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?
Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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| Police fire on protesters blocking an intersection |
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.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
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.
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.
Quotations, though, serve another purpose in Benjamin's work.
Arendt argues that collection, rather than being a consumerist habit, is actually opposed to the capitalist mode of production.
Towards the end of the introduction, Arendt returns to the place of quotations in Benjamin's work.
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.
Benjamin identifies generational conflict in Kafka's writing.
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 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 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 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.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
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.
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.
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:
Factors shaping the feminization of labor include:
The paper was written in 1999. More than ten years later, the shift he describes has fully occurred.
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:
Some claim flexibility represents emancipatory potential. Virno disagrees.
He first presents his own take on today's conditions:
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.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Quotes of the Day - March 24, 2012
The next book on my reading list is A Bed for the Night by David Rieff. While I'm really enjoying the content of the book so far, I don't find his writing as smooth as, say Paul Berman's. The sentences tend to be a bit long, verging on clunky, and there are occasional Latinate flourishes that make it difficult to read. His tone is serious, perhaps even somber. Though this adds gravitas to the points he makes, it sometimes feels overdone.
Or I could simply be trying to make up excuses for why I've been reading at such a slow pace. In any event, there are a number of noteworthy passages and points Rieff makes. His insight into "humanitarianism in crisis", as he calls it, is particularly relevant given all the (digital) ink spilled about the Kony2012 campaign and Invisible Children.
Within the first five pages, Rieff tackles one of the most difficult challenges of life in a globalized time: the challenge of balancing particularism with universalism.
Rieff seems to recognize the challenge of universal solidarity, and he attempts to address the questions of: how can we feel empathy for those with whom we have nothing in common other than the fact that we are all human? Or, is the basic fact that we are all human enough for me to through off all ideological and arbitrary distinctions? Rieff responds to the questions somewhat pessimistically.
Part of what makes Rieff's critique of the current humanitarian model so trenchant is the bluntness and even cynicism of his statements.
Or I could simply be trying to make up excuses for why I've been reading at such a slow pace. In any event, there are a number of noteworthy passages and points Rieff makes. His insight into "humanitarianism in crisis", as he calls it, is particularly relevant given all the (digital) ink spilled about the Kony2012 campaign and Invisible Children.
Within the first five pages, Rieff tackles one of the most difficult challenges of life in a globalized time: the challenge of balancing particularism with universalism.
"But what of the Western journalist, photographer, or writer for whom, willingly or unwillingly, the dead of the World Trade Center carry more emotional and symbolic weight than the dead of Kigali, Aceh, or Kabul? We may all reject this logic of the double standard emotionally, but if we really are being honest, that includes all of us" (pg. 4).Given the events of the past week - the killings of innocent Afghan civilians by an American soldier and the murder of Jewish school students by an Islamic fundamentalist - the above passage is particularly resonant. The massacre in Afghanistan weighs heavily on my conscience. I feel a sense, not of responsibility, but perhaps complicity. After all, my tax dollars fund the continuing occupation of the country - an occupation that facilitated this mass murder of civilians. And I feel almost a sense of guilt for not, to paraphrase Mario Savio, throwing my body upon the gears of the machine to stop a brutal and imperialist war from continuing. Have I done enough to voice opposition to U.S. presence in Afghanistan? Could I be doing more to challenge the expansion of American military influence overseas? But at the same time, I don't viscerally mourn for the Afghan citizens the way I think I should. In terms of pure numerical significance, their deaths should weigh heavier on my conscience. But they don't. I don't feel as though I know, or that I could have known them. More importantly, I think, I simply cannot empathize with them. I cannot say, "that could've been me." But with the dead French children in Toulouse, I feel a much more emotional kind of solidarity. Rationally, I shouldn't. I know those children no better than I know the Afghanis. I have no more connection to the Jews of Toulouse than I do to the Muslims of Kabul. Yet, there is a deep, tearjerking pain that I feel when I think about the murder of those French children. They were students at a Jewish day school, just like I once was. They were killed for being Jewish, just like me. I could be them, I was them. I am them.
Rieff seems to recognize the challenge of universal solidarity, and he attempts to address the questions of: how can we feel empathy for those with whom we have nothing in common other than the fact that we are all human? Or, is the basic fact that we are all human enough for me to through off all ideological and arbitrary distinctions? Rieff responds to the questions somewhat pessimistically.
"After all, it has never been my experience that people in Somalia inquired after the fate of people in Bosnia, or people in Angola worried about people in Nagorno-Karabakh. Wounds breed self-absorption; that is simply human" (pg. 5).He puts into two sentences what would've taken me at least an entire page to get at.
Part of what makes Rieff's critique of the current humanitarian model so trenchant is the bluntness and even cynicism of his statements.
"...[W]hat thinking person can take seriously the idea that there is any such thing as the international community? Where are the shared alues uniting the Untied Staes and China, Denmark and Indonesia, Japan and Angola that make such talk anything more than an exercise in self-flattering rhetoric?" (pg. 8).Apart from taking another stab at the kind of universalism that has come into style among international policy elites, Rieff challenges the very value of the United Nations. The UN and the broader "international community", he seems to argue, is little more than a puppet court of which the United States is the judge, jury, and executioner. Unfortunately, such a view is a pretty accurate depiction of the truth.
"Of course there is an international order, dominated by the United States, and there are international instituions, like the United nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. But the reality is that the international community is a myth and a way to conceal the bad news about the present in septic sheets of piety about the future. This should be clear to anyone who considers the question of force. As Sir Brian Urquart, one of the key figures of the first four decades of the UN's existence on put it, 'if there is a world community, then who is the sheriff?' Does anyone imagine that the United Staes will act in the altruistic way such a mandate implies? And if not the United States, then who?
"The reality is that the moment one taps on the idea of the international community it falls apart like a child's broken toy" (pg. 9).The growth of the Occupy movement inspired a debate about the role of American workers in the broader global economy. I remember hearing a teacher, or maybe it was a parent, remind everyone who would listen that though they might be part of the 99 percent in the U.S., they were certainly part of the global 1 percent. The Wall Street Journal jumped on the same idea, as I recall, publishing a link to a website that would calculate an individual's global income percentile based on the dollar value provided. My bet is that David Rieff would feel similarly about the rhetoric of the Occupy movement.
"While the best minds in the liberal West have focused on new rights and new international norms, struggled t create international tribunals and urged an end to impunity for tyrants and warlords, a 2002 World Bank study has shown that the income gap between the rich and poor worlds has been widening steadily" (pg. 15).Charity and free medical care may address the developing world's health problems in the present. The problem is that today's conditions most certainly will not exist tomorrow.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Austerity and Dependence
Welcome to the era of the gerontocracy. Nearly all political energy is exhausted in dealing with the ramifications of the growth of one demographic: the elderly. Such a political climate was predicted a decade ago. But, now that the call for austerity measures has been issued, the American public has been asked to reckon with the facts.
"Today the ratio of working taxpayers to nonworking pensioners in the developed world is around 3:1. By 2030, absent reform, this ratio will fall to 1.5:1, and in some countries, such as Germany and Italy, it will drop all the way down to 1:1 or even lower. While the longevity revolution represents a miraculous triumph of modern medicine and the extra years of life will surely be treasured by the elderly and their families, pension plans and other retirement benefit programs were not designed to provide these billions of extra years of payouts" (Peterson, G. Peter. Grey Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis. Foreign Affairs. Jan/Feb 1999).
Faced with the financial crisis on one hand and this demographic crisis on the other, neoliberalism presents us with a false choice - cut education and social services for the young and the most in need and leave Medicare and Social Security untouched, or cut entitlement programs for the current generation of retirees. The choice is a false one; agreeing to any kind of cuts affirms the logic of neoliberalism and its arsenal of moral conceptions regarding debt and deficits.
The generational conflict must be acknowledged. The youth of today are going to foot the bill the profligacy of the ruling generation - a generation that includes the Baby Boomers, the first cohort of which is about to retire. Students and recent graduates already drowning in debt are being asked to pay for the continued State support of their parents, whether through taxes or cuts to public education. Yet this generational politics described by Connor Kilpatrick in this essay at Jacobin and Malcolm Harris in this essay at the New Inquiry will not be solved by fighting the elderly for the last scraps of government assistance. Such an argument does not break from the logic of neoliberalism. In fact it uses the very language of neoliberalism to make its case. To truly fight austerity and the economic order it rationalizes, we must throw out the market-based conception of "dependence".
One of the biggest obstacles in the way of successfully fighting austerity is the continued use of "dependence" by the left. Declarations such as, "batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while" are characteristic of a reactionary argument. Indeed, Reagannites and Thatcherites provided this same rationale provided during for cutting social services during the 1980s.
The reasoning behind portraying the elderly as dependent is as follows: since the elderly, like the unemployed, do not participate in the productive process they are not entitled to any kind of support. And, because those populations do not participate in productive life, the rest of the able-bodied population is forced to subsidize their indolence. A serious challenge to the rationale for austerity rejects the idea of dependence completely and reframes government assistance as an issue of freedom. In an essay for the Nation last year, Corey Robin discussed how this might be done:
The reasoning behind portraying the elderly as dependent is as follows: since the elderly, like the unemployed, do not participate in the productive process they are not entitled to any kind of support. And, because those populations do not participate in productive life, the rest of the able-bodied population is forced to subsidize their indolence. A serious challenge to the rationale for austerity rejects the idea of dependence completely and reframes government assistance as an issue of freedom. In an essay for the Nation last year, Corey Robin discussed how this might be done:
"We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job."
Social Security and Medicare do not abridge freedom by way of government intervention. Instead, these social welfare programs expand freedoms for the members of a polity. Social Security allows the elderly to live free from the threat of starvation, provides the elderly to move about freely despite living on a fixed income, and frees the elderly from the threatening vicissitudes of post-employment life. This kind of reasoning must be extended to all corners of economic life. Austerity measures, contrary to what Democrats and Republicans say, do not expand freedom. Placing the fates of those citizens most in need - students, the poor, and the elderly - at the mercy of the market does not enhance individual freedom; it limits it.
This mode of thought can even be extended to explain the relationship between the youth and the retired. Asking the younger generation to pay for the care, in the form of cuts to healthcare and education, absolutely constitues a curtailment of freedom. Yet, the way to prevent this state of unfreedom is not to in turn cut social services and entitlement program for the elderly. That, too, is a curtailment of freedom. The State, empowered by a democratic polity, can instead expand support for at-risk populations, in turn expanding freedom. This idea, that an expansion of social services is the answer to the problem of intergenerational conflict, is the real challenge to neoliberalism and austerity.
***
There is another component to the popular picture of generational conflict. The irony of living in a gerontocracy is that when the government is run by old people in possession of fantastic wealth - Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, John McCain, to name a few - it is easy to forget that the many older Americans are not so fortunate. Baby Boomers, from the union-shop manufacturer to the school teacher, have been also been fleeced and exploited. They, too, have seen wages stagnate, houses foreclosed on, savings wiped out, and debt increased. The response to the crisis and concomitant calls for austerity measures should not be a cry of "eat the old." It should be the cry of "eat the rich", accompanied with a hearty shout of "no one is dependent!"
Don't fight the elderly simply because, after years of wage slavery, they finally get to step off the unceasing economic treadmill. Fight those who argue that anyone deemed "unproductive" does not have the right to a basic level of social security. Challenge the idea that people are only of value to society when they have productive potential. If neoliberalism is an economic model that awards power to those with the fattest wallets, fight for an economic paradigm that insures everyone has an equal ability and equal resources to engage in the political process.
It is true that the young have been made to bear a disproportionate burden of the austerity measures that have come out of the financial crisis, and that they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Students and recent graduates are paying for the profligacy of the bankers and the ruling class in the form of cuts to public education. These same students, in the event that they find a job, will then pay for those same profligate bankers to retire, while the students, when they grow old, will not have the luxury of that same kind of safety-net. All of this is tremendously distressing and reason enough to take to the streets. But, at the same time, the pensioned factory worker or school teacher is not the enemy; they are partners in the fight to alter the status quo that forces us to make the false choice - to side with either the youth or the aged. When you face off with the police in during the next occupation, remember to stand side-by-side with your parents, not face-to-face against them.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Quotes of the Day - March 8, 2012
I finished Power and the Idealists last night, but I didn't have time to write about my favorite passages and quotes. The second half of the book is fantastic (the book itself has become one of recent favorites). I found myself dog-earring nearly every page, so at one point I chose to highlight only the very most noteworthy or important passages, which, of course, turned out to be nearly half the book.
One of things I like so much about Paul Berman is his ability to see across ideological divides and recognize the similarities between ideologies that at first glance seem opposed to each other. In the chapter "The Muslim World and the American Left", Berman points out the similarities between religious social conservatism and tiers-mondiste Marxism.
Berman again takes a shot at certain segments of the radical Left when he discusses the similarities between the Left's fetishism of insurrection and the Right's fetishism of the glory days of yore. That is, both the far Left and Right have the tendency to become violently infatuated with fantasy.
Slavoj Zizek often refers to (like in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g) Soviet communism as the greatest moral catastrophe - greater than Nazism, because at least with the fascists you knew things were going to be horrific. With the Soviets you were told there would be utopia, but in reality there was exactly the opposite. Since I feel a kind of personal connection to left-wing history, it always upsets me when atrocities are committed in the name of ideals to which I am sympathetic. Berman, again while discussing Makiya's Republic of Fear, neatly describes this feeling" (pg. 182).
I typically describe myself as a libertarian leftist - opposed to both the tyranny of the market and the tyranny of the state - so I've always been sympathetic to the work of Socialism ou Barbarie. That Sartre thought it necessary to disparage them is certainly disappointing. There is a tendency on the Left, as there is in most ideological camps, to limit the diversity of thought and criticism. Sartre's behavior is a perfect example.
It's fairly common for Americans to consider Islamic fundamentalism to be an antiquated notion, one that conjures up images of Saladin and the defeats of the crusades. For those in more Jewish milieus, like the one in which I've been raised, Islamic fundamentalism carries with it a similar old-world connotation. So, I was totally surprised to see Berman, by way of Azar Nafisi (here's the article he quotes: http://www.tnr.com/article/muslim-allies-septmember-11-taliban-islam ) describe Islamic fundamentalism as a modern conception.
The other insight that, when revealed, nearly made me exclaim out loud, was the description of Daniel Cohn-Bendit's comparison between the U.S.'s Bush Doctrine and the grandiosity of the Bolsheviks.
Perhaps it is just the exalting tone in which Berman discusses Kouchner, but I found myself genuinely admiring the former French foreign minister. I'm certainly not a fan of Kouchner's preference for hierarchy, but I somehow associate with his former self a kind of pragmatic leftism that is sorely needed right now.
Lenin famously slandered Left-communism as "an infantile disorder." I think the same can be said for left-wing tribalism and left-wing sympathies for Arab nationalism in particular; it completely defies the corner stone of the Left - internationalism.
I shall close this post with the words of Joschka Fischer, who so eloquently explained the necessity for alter-globalization, rather than anti-globalization. Anti-globalization carries with it a sense of opposition to progress and a rejection of the need to expand civil liberties for all people. And, after all, we cannot halt globalization, we can only attempt to change it; anti-globalization promises us nothing, while alter-globalization promises the co-option of the very mechanisms that seek to co-opt expressions of liberty.
One of things I like so much about Paul Berman is his ability to see across ideological divides and recognize the similarities between ideologies that at first glance seem opposed to each other. In the chapter "The Muslim World and the American Left", Berman points out the similarities between religious social conservatism and tiers-mondiste Marxism.
"But Nafisi's description of classroom debate suggests eomthign else. The diatribe by this one student, holding up his copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald criminal text, is not at all a seventh century speech, nor a speech by a peasant from the hills, herding his goats...This speech enunciates some of the principles established by the extreme right in Europe long ago - the notion of an authentic culture under insidious attack by evil cultural forces from abroad" (pg. 162).
"Then again, these ideas have sometimes made themselves perfectly at home on the Marxist left, in a different version. Mike Gold was F. Scott Fitzgerald's contemporary and rival, and in the early nineteen thirties Gold used to issue literary interdictions in precisely this condemnatory spirit on behalf of the American Communist Party - to maintain the proletarian purity of the slum-dwellers and factory workers, and to rescue revolutionary ideas from bourgeois contamination. Even the sexual imagery in the Iranian student's classroom speech - 'a rape of our culture' strikes a familiar note" (pgs. 162-3).In the same vein, Berman points out the ideological parochialism in which the students of the New Left found themselves immersed during their infatuation with Maoism.
"American New Leftists cited Mao Zedong's 'taks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art', a much-thumbed essay in its time. (This is the essay where Mao asks, 'Literature and art for whom?' and ends up by calling for the destruction of 'feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, liberalistic, individualistic, nihilistic, art-for-art's sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and the proletariat.')" (pg. 163).Maybe this puts me off because of my affinity for "bourgeois" art or because I want so desperately to see a revived version of Socialisme ou Barbarie. But, I really have a hard time getting behind Mao's statement. Without waxing philosophical about the inherent beauty of art, I think it's sufficient to say that a world in which all art is directed towards the singular task of "revolution" would be a very monochromatic world.
Berman again takes a shot at certain segments of the radical Left when he discusses the similarities between the Left's fetishism of insurrection and the Right's fetishism of the glory days of yore. That is, both the far Left and Right have the tendency to become violently infatuated with fantasy.
"Fantasy role-playing, it occurs to me, is the defining quality of all totalitarian movements and systems - role-playing by totalitarian militants who feel entirely justified in liquidating everyone who fails to have a proper role in the grand tableau of the reigning mythology" (pg. 164).Burrowing deeper into territory covered by Hannah Arendt in the Origins of Totalitarianism, Berman even hints at the problems of vanguardism - it is predicated upon a kind of condescension that implies the ignorance or weakness of the general population. It's a violent kind of elitism, in short.
"That is why the totalitarians always end up slaughtering masses of people - out of frustration at the huma race's stubborn refusal to be anything but the human race, and out of the lust for thrills, and out of a realization that only in death can the mythic universe be fully achieved" (pg. 170).Through his discussion of the work and thought of Kanan Makiya, Berman nicely points out the value of the Enlightenment.
"Makiya went on, 'We in the Middle east had taken over certain themes from the West wholesale - Germanic nationalism, Marxism, the imperative toward industrialization - but we'd never experienced the Enlightenment, in which these themes needed to be grounded if they were going to make any real sense" (pg.178).I always get a big frustrated when certain Leftists attempt to argue that the Enlightenment was just another page in the book of bourgeois, patriarchal domination. Whether or not the title of heirs to the Enlightenment has been taken by opponents of progress and an egalitarian society, it's still necessary to acknowledge the intellectual heritage of today's flavors of Leftism.
Slavoj Zizek often refers to (like in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g) Soviet communism as the greatest moral catastrophe - greater than Nazism, because at least with the fascists you knew things were going to be horrific. With the Soviets you were told there would be utopia, but in reality there was exactly the opposite. Since I feel a kind of personal connection to left-wing history, it always upsets me when atrocities are committed in the name of ideals to which I am sympathetic. Berman, again while discussing Makiya's Republic of Fear, neatly describes this feeling" (pg. 182).
"So here again...was a book by somebody who had enlisted in the left-wing student movements of circa 1968 in order to fight against imperialism and capitalism - only to stumble on the existence of another kind of oppression, which was even worse, and which he knew from his own experience and not merely from his readings."
I typically describe myself as a libertarian leftist - opposed to both the tyranny of the market and the tyranny of the state - so I've always been sympathetic to the work of Socialism ou Barbarie. That Sartre thought it necessary to disparage them is certainly disappointing. There is a tendency on the Left, as there is in most ideological camps, to limit the diversity of thought and criticism. Sartre's behavior is a perfect example.
"Sartre attacked the libertarian left of the nineteen-fifties as 'dirty rats,' referring to the Socialism or Barbarism comrades, who were busily trying to reveal Stalinism for what it was; and Sartre's reading public, which was vast, turned away from the dirty rats" (pg. 183).
It's fairly common for Americans to consider Islamic fundamentalism to be an antiquated notion, one that conjures up images of Saladin and the defeats of the crusades. For those in more Jewish milieus, like the one in which I've been raised, Islamic fundamentalism carries with it a similar old-world connotation. So, I was totally surprised to see Berman, by way of Azar Nafisi (here's the article he quotes: http://www.tnr.com/article/muslim-allies-septmember-11-taliban-islam ) describe Islamic fundamentalism as a modern conception.
"In that same February 2003, Nafisi published an essay in the New Republic making a simple observation: 'What we call Islamic fundamentalism, for lack of a better word, is a modern phenomenon, in the same way fascism and Communism, both products of the West, are modern'" (pg. 190).A significant portion of the anti-imperialist Left exploded when Christopher Hitchens used the phrase "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe Islamic fundamentalism, but I think it's a remarkably apt description; it puts Islamic fundamentalism into the proper context and "deorientalizes" it. Islamic fundamentalism, then, no longer appears as a caricature of traditional Islam taken to the extreme. Rather, it is seen as it it truly is - a synthesis of totalitarianism with the theocratic currents of Islam and as an unequivocally modern construction.
The other insight that, when revealed, nearly made me exclaim out loud, was the description of Daniel Cohn-Bendit's comparison between the U.S.'s Bush Doctrine and the grandiosity of the Bolsheviks.
"'You want to change the whole world!' he said. "Like them, you claim that history will show that truth is on your side. You want the world to follow the American dream, and you believe that you know what is best for ... all other countries.' Here was arrogance. 'Because you are Americans, you have the biggest army in the world - you can do anything you want. This is revolutionary hubris'" (pg. 195).With all the mendacity and veiled imperial aspirations, Bush Doctrine era U.S. rhetoric and the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks do indeed seem remarkably familiar, not to mention the fact that many of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration owed their intellectual foundations to the work of ex-Trotskyites like Irving Kristol.
Perhaps it is just the exalting tone in which Berman discusses Kouchner, but I found myself genuinely admiring the former French foreign minister. I'm certainly not a fan of Kouchner's preference for hierarchy, but I somehow associate with his former self a kind of pragmatic leftism that is sorely needed right now.
"But Kouchner remained a little skeptical on some other outcomes of the uprisings and the countercultural spirit. Maybe his own leftism always retained a few habits and assumptions of a slightly earlier age, pre-'68 - a leftism that insisted on being practical, more concerned with measurable consequences, less interested in mere attitudes and styles" (pg. 226).I also chose to highlight the above quotation because it seems to me to be a subtle criticism of the "lifestylism" that resulted as the revolutionary momentum from '68 waned. Though maybe not the what Berman means by describing Kouchner's leftism as practical, I see it as the reasonable but still radical counterweight to the old maxim of "turn on, tune in, drop out" - which brought nothing constructive to the campaigns for socioeconomic justice during that time.
Lenin famously slandered Left-communism as "an infantile disorder." I think the same can be said for left-wing tribalism and left-wing sympathies for Arab nationalism in particular; it completely defies the corner stone of the Left - internationalism.
"The ancient left-wing principle that used to go under the name of internationalism showed no concern at all for the integrity of duly constituted states. 'Workers of the world' meant workers without borders" (pg. 244).Internationalism desperately needs to be reemphasized. Leftists marching alongside Islamic fundamentalists or locking arms with totalitarian nationalists is, if anything, a sign of a very "infantile disorder." In recounting the debate between Cohn-Bendit and Kouchner, Berman puts this pointedly.
"The mass marches against the war, the placards, the slogans, the chanting crowds - every last aspect of this movement reminded him of the grossest errors of the left-wing past. 'In our generation,' [Kouchner] told Cohn - Bendit, 'antiwar marches used to offer protection to the worst Stalinist regimes, the most frightening massacres, and because of this, I wouldn't let myself take part anymore - nor would you, Danny. God knows how often we heard people shout, "Down with Bush!" But I didn't hear even the tiniest cry, "Down with Saddam!" And let's not even mention - or rather, we had better mention - the anti-semitic incidents" (pg. 265).From now on, every mention of ANSWER will remind of the above passage.
I shall close this post with the words of Joschka Fischer, who so eloquently explained the necessity for alter-globalization, rather than anti-globalization. Anti-globalization carries with it a sense of opposition to progress and a rejection of the need to expand civil liberties for all people. And, after all, we cannot halt globalization, we can only attempt to change it; anti-globalization promises us nothing, while alter-globalization promises the co-option of the very mechanisms that seek to co-opt expressions of liberty.
'"It depends,' he said at Princeton, 'even more on the globalization of fundamental values, such as human rights, respect for life, religious and cultural tolerance, the equality of all human beings, of men and women, the rule of law and democracy and a share of the blessings of education, progress and social security...positive globalization is the real strategic response to the deadly challenge of a new totalitarianism" (pg. 285).
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Quotes of the Day - February 15, 2012
I have a bit more free time now that I've been accepted to college, which means I finally have time to start working on my never-ending reading list. At the risk of turning this into a book-blog, I've decided to record some of my favorite quotes and my thoughts about the books I read.
At the moment, I'm in the middle of reading To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson.
"Marxism gave a meaning to modernity. It said that, wittingly or not, the individual performs a role in a drama that has a shape and a goal, a trajectory, and that modernity will turn out to be just one act in that drama" (Foreword, xv).Essentially, Wilson puts for the point that attachment to private property prevented the Revolution from realizing its full emancipatory potential.
"After Thermidor, he rallied around him those elements of the Revolution who were trying to insist on its original aims. In his paper, The Tribune of the People, he denounced the new constitution of 1795, which had abolished universal suffrage and imposed a high property qualification. He demanded not merely political but also economic equality. He declared that he would prefer civil war itself to 'this horrible concord which strangles the hungry.' But the men who had expropriated the nobles and the Church remained loyal to the principle of property itself. The Tribune of the People was stopped, and Babeuf and his associates were sent to prison" (pg. 73).
"The cause of revolutions is the bending beyond what they can bear of the human springs of society" (pg. 76).
"The 'truly human' is that which is to be realized when we shall have arrived at the society without classes. In the meantime, those elements of society which alone can bring about such a future - the disenfranchised proletariat and the revolutionary bourgeois thinkers - in proportion as they feel group solidarity among themselves, must cease to feel human solidarity with their antagonists. Their antagonists - who have 'left between man and man no other bond but crude self-interest and callous "cash-payment'" - have irreparably destroyed that solidarity" (pg. 159).The above quote is hard for me to get behind. It makes sense; it's the logical conclusion of the analysis of the exploitive relation between capital and labor. Yet, I have a problem renouncing my basic human solidarity with the exploiters - do they necessarily surrender their humanity because of their crude and callous self-interest? Or, does a strand of universal solidarity prevail in spite of the existence of exploitation? Perhaps I'm too attached to the sort of liberal universalism that sometimes gets in the way of revolutions.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Crisis Generation
Much of the current generational writing - about the Millennials in particular - defines generations based on their relation to the development and growth of the internet. Hence the description of the Millennials as the first generation to grow up on the internet and the last generation to remember a time before the internet. This approach to generational writing is problematic for (at least) two reasons.
Firstly, the progression of the relation between members of a generational cohort and the internet does not take place in a vacuum. There is, of course, a broader geopolitical and socio-economic context for any generation. The web-centric approach to discussing the Millennials may be useful for a certain kind of writing, but by ignoring the greater context it ignores one of the most important political events in recent history - September 11 - which separates the younger Millennials (my peers and me) from our older brothers and sisters. Both cohorts may have grown comfortable with the internet, but every aspect of life - including the way people interact with the internet - changed in the wake of 9/11; the United States entered into a state of siege and the mindset of "total war all the time" from which it has never emerged.
With the expansion of the national security state the younger Millennials, the oldest of which are now in high school, have lived a near dystopian existence. For us, war has been the status quo, ignorance blissful, and dissent consistently construed as an act of treason. Out of fear of arrest or loss of future career opportunities we are afraid to step on to the streets, unlike our older brothers and sisters - grad students and post-grads - who stand at the front of the Occupy protests. Hemmed in on all corners since we were toddlers by the expanding state apparatus and the digital extension of the global market, we have opted for inaction in order to preserve the modicum of comfort provided by obedience and conformity. As our cohort had just learned to read when the Patriot Act was passed, we have been raised with considerably less freedom than our older brothers and sisters.
Secondly, the rate of change in the nature of the relation between younger Americans and the internet accelerated rapidly with the passage of each year. Those of us still in high school can hardly remember a time before Facebook, let alone a time before wireless connectivity. In fact, these rapid changes eliminated many of the commonalities critics now use to draw a unform picture of the Millennials. Such a uniform picture, however, does not exist; those born in the mid- to late-nineties experienced the internet - considered the linchpin of writing on the Millenials - in a drastically different way. Younger Millennials never met the cyber flaneur, since our whole internet experience has been privatized and commercialized from the get-go, while our older brothers and sisters had the opportunities to experience the web without the endless paywalls and omnipresent advertisements.
For us, the generational clash is about far more than economics and class identity. It's about reclaiming our lives from the state that has turned our schools into prisons and our streets into warzones and from the market that has invaded our homes and once-personal spaces. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't even be considered part of the Millennial Generation; the post-9/11 world into which we were raised is far darker and oppressive than the angsty boredom of the 1990's during which our older brothers and sisters came of age.
Firstly, the progression of the relation between members of a generational cohort and the internet does not take place in a vacuum. There is, of course, a broader geopolitical and socio-economic context for any generation. The web-centric approach to discussing the Millennials may be useful for a certain kind of writing, but by ignoring the greater context it ignores one of the most important political events in recent history - September 11 - which separates the younger Millennials (my peers and me) from our older brothers and sisters. Both cohorts may have grown comfortable with the internet, but every aspect of life - including the way people interact with the internet - changed in the wake of 9/11; the United States entered into a state of siege and the mindset of "total war all the time" from which it has never emerged.
With the expansion of the national security state the younger Millennials, the oldest of which are now in high school, have lived a near dystopian existence. For us, war has been the status quo, ignorance blissful, and dissent consistently construed as an act of treason. Out of fear of arrest or loss of future career opportunities we are afraid to step on to the streets, unlike our older brothers and sisters - grad students and post-grads - who stand at the front of the Occupy protests. Hemmed in on all corners since we were toddlers by the expanding state apparatus and the digital extension of the global market, we have opted for inaction in order to preserve the modicum of comfort provided by obedience and conformity. As our cohort had just learned to read when the Patriot Act was passed, we have been raised with considerably less freedom than our older brothers and sisters.
Secondly, the rate of change in the nature of the relation between younger Americans and the internet accelerated rapidly with the passage of each year. Those of us still in high school can hardly remember a time before Facebook, let alone a time before wireless connectivity. In fact, these rapid changes eliminated many of the commonalities critics now use to draw a unform picture of the Millennials. Such a uniform picture, however, does not exist; those born in the mid- to late-nineties experienced the internet - considered the linchpin of writing on the Millenials - in a drastically different way. Younger Millennials never met the cyber flaneur, since our whole internet experience has been privatized and commercialized from the get-go, while our older brothers and sisters had the opportunities to experience the web without the endless paywalls and omnipresent advertisements.
For us, the generational clash is about far more than economics and class identity. It's about reclaiming our lives from the state that has turned our schools into prisons and our streets into warzones and from the market that has invaded our homes and once-personal spaces. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't even be considered part of the Millennial Generation; the post-9/11 world into which we were raised is far darker and oppressive than the angsty boredom of the 1990's during which our older brothers and sisters came of age.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
The Wall Street Journal Just Doesn't Get the Middle Class
I like to think of the Wall Street Journal as the organ of the privileged class, the paper of the "Haves." Though many on the right criticize the New York Times for being elitist or the newspaper for wealthy liberals, it speaks mostly to the striving and upwardly mobile, or the "Have-some, Want-Mores." For example, you don't find the ads for luxury items in the Wall Street Journal that you do in the New York Times because luxury items aren't seductive or elusive for the Wall Street Journal's readers. Want proof? Open up the front section of today's Times. It takes only one page turn to be confronted with an advertisement for Tiffany and Co. Now open up, say, the Review section of the Wall Street Journal. Not an ad for a luxury item in sight.
It isn't that viewers today, living in a second Gilded Age, identify with the plight of the servants and the precariousness of their employment. Instead, according to Daniels, widespread interest in the series can be attributed to the desire of today's plebeian masses to be as refined and well-dressed as the underclass of early twentieth century British society.
Daniels does not contextualize the series; he does not ask, why, during the most severe economic downturn in recent memory, has a show that lays bare class disparities become widely popular? For him, the very fact that the series allows the "Have-some, Want-Mores' to fantasize about being fabulously wealthy is enough to explain the series' appeal. Look, he seems to say, even the servants are sophisticated and stylish. See, being poor isn't so bad. But this is far from the truth.
"Downton Abbey" owes its popularity to the frustration of a middle class that is facing imminent proletarianization. As Slavoj Zizek writes in "The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie", the protests that have swept through much of the industrialized world "are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians." Viewers see in the relationships between the servants and the gentry a reflection of their own relations with their bosses and managers. Frustration with the corporate hierarchy renders the class struggle seen in "Downton Abbey" a visceral representation of the real challenges faced by workers today.
What Daniels does get right is that the series glamorizes the beleaguered servants of the Grantham estate, putting a human face on bitter class relations. "The series portrays an aristocratic world in which butlers and footmen dress far better than today's billionaires." For the workers of today, the perceived luxury to which the servant class has access in "Downton Abbey" is attainable only in dreams. And when the show is over and the TV is turned off, the viewers must return to the drudgery of the labors, be it blue collar or white collar, left with only the empty hope that someday all the hard work they've been told to do will finally result in the promised riches.
Strategically positioned on the pages of the Times, the Hublot watch or Dior dress is the object of desire for the "Have-some, Want-Mores", not for the "Haves." Readers of the Wall Street Journal, the "Haves", don't need advertisements in order to dream of possessing the symbols of fabulous wealth; all they need to do is open their closets or drawers. And nothing, at least recently, demonstrates the way in which the Wall Street Journal writes for the privileged class more than its recent review of the popular TV show "Downton Abbey".
In "The Secret Appeal of 'Downton Abbey' conservative writer Anthony Daniels, under his typical pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, unintentionally lays bare the disconnect between the Wall Street Journal and the middle class. The essay begins with the assertion that "everyone needs (and almost everyone) finds someone to look down on", "however egalitarian we may be in theory and however nervous we might be about our own position in society." The writer assumes that the condescension with which the "Haves" refer to the inhabitants of the lower rungs on the social ladder is a universal trait; the impulse to exploit or profit from the labor of others is a natural human impulse. According to Daniels, the desire to derive pleasure from the arduous labor of others isn't something of which to be ashamed. If anything, it provides the impetus for self-improvement - to move, like the characters in a Horatio Alger story, from rags to riches - without which no one would work hard to improve their lot in society.
In "The Secret Appeal of 'Downton Abbey' conservative writer Anthony Daniels, under his typical pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, unintentionally lays bare the disconnect between the Wall Street Journal and the middle class. The essay begins with the assertion that "everyone needs (and almost everyone) finds someone to look down on", "however egalitarian we may be in theory and however nervous we might be about our own position in society." The writer assumes that the condescension with which the "Haves" refer to the inhabitants of the lower rungs on the social ladder is a universal trait; the impulse to exploit or profit from the labor of others is a natural human impulse. According to Daniels, the desire to derive pleasure from the arduous labor of others isn't something of which to be ashamed. If anything, it provides the impetus for self-improvement - to move, like the characters in a Horatio Alger story, from rags to riches - without which no one would work hard to improve their lot in society.
In the eyes of the Daniels, "for many Americans watching 'Downton Abbey' must be like indulging in a guilty passion." It affords the average viewer a glimpse into the world of their supposed dreams wherein they become the exploiter, finally with a subordinate and "someone to look down on." Furthermore, for the victims of post-fordism, "the series...satisfies a secret or vicarious longing for elegance without imposing the hard work that's necessary to achieve it in reality." Workers, unwilling to face the reality put forth by Social Darwinists that only assiduousness can bring about true wealth, can experience all the luxury without the labor.
Daniels does not contextualize the series; he does not ask, why, during the most severe economic downturn in recent memory, has a show that lays bare class disparities become widely popular? For him, the very fact that the series allows the "Have-some, Want-Mores' to fantasize about being fabulously wealthy is enough to explain the series' appeal. Look, he seems to say, even the servants are sophisticated and stylish. See, being poor isn't so bad. But this is far from the truth.
"Downton Abbey" owes its popularity to the frustration of a middle class that is facing imminent proletarianization. As Slavoj Zizek writes in "The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie", the protests that have swept through much of the industrialized world "are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians." Viewers see in the relationships between the servants and the gentry a reflection of their own relations with their bosses and managers. Frustration with the corporate hierarchy renders the class struggle seen in "Downton Abbey" a visceral representation of the real challenges faced by workers today.What Daniels does get right is that the series glamorizes the beleaguered servants of the Grantham estate, putting a human face on bitter class relations. "The series portrays an aristocratic world in which butlers and footmen dress far better than today's billionaires." For the workers of today, the perceived luxury to which the servant class has access in "Downton Abbey" is attainable only in dreams. And when the show is over and the TV is turned off, the viewers must return to the drudgery of the labors, be it blue collar or white collar, left with only the empty hope that someday all the hard work they've been told to do will finally result in the promised riches.
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