Quotes of the Day - April 1, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The process of the feminization of labor is as follows:

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

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

Factors shaping the feminization of labor include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some claim flexibility represents emancipatory potential. Virno disagrees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In immaterial capitalism, industry must "informalize":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

"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.

Quotes of the Day - March 16, 2012

I read Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, today. It was a nice change from my usual focus on non-fiction, and I thoroughly enjoyed the philosophical debates so neatly incorporated into the book's prose. That said, there were a few clunky metaphors here and there, and one or two instances of hyperbole taken too far. I recommend reading the book in a single day or sitting, since it is short enough to get through in a single sitting and since it's power is best felt when one is immersed in the text. Being a work of fiction, Darkness at Noon has fewer passages I want to highlight on philosophical or political grounds, but there are a few. There are also a few passages so well written I could not resist highlighting them.

As a likely history major in college (when I finally escape from the doldrums of high school), I've always found the description of History (yes, capital "H" in the Marxist sense) as a science strange. The explanation of history is a matter of interpretation, not a study of scientific fact. Koestler's comparison between history and astronomy points out this strangeness.

"That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables and statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the black board an algebraic forumla representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process'" (pg. 17).

I mentioned this before in one of my posts on To the Finland Station - what attracts me to Marxism is the idea that one can interact with history. It is possible to fuel the engine of historical change.

"'Certainly,' said Rubashov. 'A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people - one does not work out x, but operates with it as if no knew it. In our case x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this  x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is  to recognize x for what it stands for'" (pg. 85).

With such an uplifting and inspirational tenor, this passage reminds of me of a song that seems to embrace the idea of making history. (Make Your Own History, by Stray from the Path)

I recently had a discussion with a friend about the obligations of the currently existing, living generations to the generations of the future. He asked, is it worth making the world better for a generation that has yet to be born if this entails making life for the living generations more difficult? We went back and forth for a while, and I was reminded of Natasha Lennard's piece in the latest issue of the New Inquiry. In it, she discusses how certain strands queer theory challenge the child- and future-centric nature of policy and all forms of society. In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, too, weighs in on this issue through his character of Rubashov, the aging revolutionary now put on trial for betraying the revolution.

"Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that it's average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people's standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies" (pg. 162).

Not only does the above passage assert that no, it is not worth immiseration of the living generations in order to provide the potential of a better life to the generations to come. For Rubashov, and other revolutionaries, the Revolution represents the promise of that better life for future generations; it has not yet been realized, and in order to realize it, significant sacrifices must be made. Rubashov's heresy - just one of many - is that he rejects the idea that the present must be made miserable in order to make the future better.

One of the remarkable things in Koestler's writing is the way he captures the brutal logic of the State establishment. Ivanov, Rubashov's initial prosecutor, lays out the chilling moral calculus that underlies the foundation of the totalitarian state.

"Yes, we liquidate the parisitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year - only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself" (pg. 165)?

An orthodox adherent to the faith of the Revolution, Ivanov believes that death, if achieved with the purpose of furthering the Revolution, is more meaningful than death due to natural causes. Thus, those who die due to political experimentation should be considered lucky; they died for a reason rather than at the hands of indifferent Nature. This kind of reasoning is dangerous, as thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Sir Isaiah Berlin have noted. The glorification and worship of death characteristic of totalitarian regimes, be it Nazi or Stalinist, make stopping tyranny difficult; adherents to the governing ideology are ready and willing to die to protect the cause. Likewise, there is no cost too great if there is an objective moral goal. If the Revolution and the realization of emancipatory existence is the end, all means are justifiable, regardless of cost or impact on other people. An ideology that imbues death with a sense of purpose therefore justifies endless suffering.

To address philosophical matters in the novel, Koestler employs a nice, though not necessarily original technique. He begins several chapter with excerpts from Rubashov's prison diaries; these writings provide an intellectual backdrop to the plot. In one of these excerpts, Koestler appears to address the problem of revolutionary politics - democracy has a tendency to retard revolutionary progression.

"The maturity of the masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own interests. This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the process of production and distribution of goods. A people's capacity to govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to the degree of its understanding of the structure and funding of the whole social body" (pg. 170). 

A vanguard, then, is needed until the people attain the proper level of consciousness to understand the processes of production and distribution. The need for the vanguard, or some variant of a dedicated intellectual revolutionary cadre (maybe an epistemic community), is compounded by the constant change in conditions of the post-industrial age.

"Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses as a step behind and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer" (pg. 171).

A more apt way to descrive the "political-maturity thermometer" is to view it as a measure of mass-political elasticity. How significantly does political behavior given a change in the conditions of production. Of course, such a metric could not exist, but it certainly is interesting to think about. For Rubashov, once the measure of mass-political elasticity is perfectly inelastic, the masses are mature enough for democracy.

"When the level of mass consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical civilization...again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership" (pg. 171). 

During an exchange with another prisoner, in which messages are tapped in a form of code on the walls of prison sells, Rubashov challenges the reactionary and aristocratic conceptions of honor with a simple and perhaps admirable phrase:

"Honor is to be useful without vanity" (pg. 177).

If only we could all incorporate even just a small sense of that sentiment into our daily lives. Things would be much different.

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.

"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).

Quotes of the Day - March 4, 2012

The next book on my reading list is Power and the Idealists, by Paul Berman. I decided to read it after a debate with an uncle of mine about humanitarian interventionism. I argued that while well-intentioned, humanitarian intervention has tended to exacerbate conflicts rather than end them and that, more often than not, humanitarian intervention is used a pretext for the expansion of military power. My uncle framed the debate in purely ethical terms; if you have the ability to stop a massacre you are morally obligated to do so. So, I had a general idea of what the book was going to be about. That said, now that I'm halfway through the book, Berman covers a lot of material that I did not expect to see. With a fast-paced, journalistic tone and occasional humorous flourishes, Berman deftly describes the transformation of the radicals of '68 and the New Left into the champions of liberal intervention on the world stage. And, over the course of the first two chapters, he provides a stinging critique of left-wing anti-Zionism and a humorous take on contemporary American conservatism among other noteworthy points that I have highlighted below.

Berman characterizes well the conservative fear of the moral bankrupting of America by spooky academic liberal elites. For the Right, and probably for for David Brooks, too,

 "The American public seemed to have sunk into a swamp of moral indifference, even depravity. Right and wrong had disappeared into a marshy haze. And the conservatives grew wide-eyed in astonishment and horror."

Berman's description of the non-terrorist New Left is harsh. It paints the activists of '68 as silent accomplices in the wave of left-wing terror that gripped Europe in the 1970's. His description also verges on a criticism of lifestylism.

"They were not entirely resistant to the terrorist argument. So they dithered....they labored at building their communes, kindergartens, food co-ops, new gender relations, and other elements of the new Left utopia in its countercultural version. Or else they followed the retro-Marxist example and colonized the factories in search of proletarian followers. They mooned nostalgically over the anarchosyndicalist vision of a revolutionary general strike" (pg. 52).

The last line jumped out at me. As May 1st grows nearer and talk about a general strike seeps into the mainstream media (See this Salon article). Berman's mocking tone frustrates me. A general strike, however unrealistic it is to hope for a complete halt to all business on a single day, could have intense localized effects. Even if only one factory is taken over, or one business shut down, that is a small victory that can propel the movement forward.


As much as I try to avoid Israel nowadays, it always seems to find me. I've argued for years now, with friends and family, about the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Yet, in describing the Left's post-1967 backlash against Israel, Berman shows that there is, regrettably, an often blurry line between the two.

"The 1967 war, in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel's imperialist nature. The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism. Palestinian Marxists stepped forward. Soviet resources poured in. And, under those circumstances, the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle Easter conflict, in which the New Left's vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly reconfigured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel became the crypto-Nazi state par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state" (pg. 54).

Of course, to describe Israel as a Nazi state is utterly preposterous. It is not possible to compare the actions of the Nazis to the occupation of the West Bank. Israel may be an oppressive, even apartheid state, but it is certainly not a reincarnation of Hitler's Germany. The great irony of left-wing sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and thus opposition to Israel, is that by opposing Israel for being Nazi-like, the Left puts itself quite literally in the same camp as people who themselves are Nazi-like - Islamic fundamentalists (or Islamofascists) and even Neo-Nazis themselves.

"He found himself in a military training ground where, in one part of the camp, European leftists singing left-wing songs received their anti-Zionist military training, and, in another part, European fascists singing fascist songs received their own anti-Zionist military training" (pg. 55).

I have no love for the French New Philosophers, but Glucksmann's attempts to create a new and coherent set of political ideas out of the antiquated Marxism of both the old and New Left is certainly something admirable.

"[H]e set about trying to construct a new set of political ideas. That was his project. He did this in three big steps between 1975 and the early nineteen eighties. His first step, in the mid-seventies, was to give up on his old-fashioned anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, the fundamentals of the left, in favor of what he began to call antitotalitarianism" (pg. 67).

Today, the Left is in need of revitalization more than ever. The resonance of Occupy Wall Street has provided a certain spark to segments of the political left, but it remains as disparate and factionalized as ever. Every ideological subgroup, from the insurrectionary anarchists to the social democrats, compete for scraps of political power. As much as I loath to admit it, a strong and well organized party, well-grounded in theory, might be the antidote to the Left's chronic disorganization.

Quotes of the Day - February 29, 2012

I just finished To the Finland Station, and there are a number of great lines I want to highlight and review.

The following is noteworthy, considering much of the world is still embroiled in some form of crisis:

"Marx believed that a new rebellion on the part of the petty bourgeoisie would upset the big bourgeoisie in France...and they announced in the last number of the Revue that "a revolution can hope for success only when the modern factors of production and the bourgeois tecnhique are at varience. A new revolution is possible only after a new crisis" (pg. 201).

Thoughout the book, Wilson makes numerous references to Marx's Jewish background. Perhaps I like these passages because I can relate to them, or perhaps it's because they flatter my sense of Jewish tribalism.

"If Marx is contemptuous of his race, it is primarily perhaps with the anger of Moses at finding the children of Israel dancing before the Golden Calf" (pg. 207).

"It was here that Karl Marx as a Jew had his great value for the thought of his age. The characterisic genuis of the Jew has been especially a moral genius. The sacred books of the people of Israel have served as a basis for the religions of three continents; and even in the case of the great men among the jes who do not occupy themselves with religion proper, it is usually a grasp of moral ideas which has given them their peculiar force" (pg. 301).

At certain points, passages like the one above make me uncomfortable with Wilson's philo-semitism.

In the chapter "Karl Marx: Poet of Commodities", Wilson provides a fantastic explanation and simplification of Marxist economic thought:

"The capitalist system was based on private property andso was inevitably competitive. The aim of every manufaturer was always to undersell the rest, sothat there would be a contunyal stimulus to more efficient methods of production. But the more efficient an industry became - the fast the machiens were able to do the work and the fewer people were needed to tend them - the more people would be thrown out of jobs and the more would wages be reduced. That is, the more the commodities produced, the fewer the people who would be able to buy them. In order to get rid of his goods under these continually tightening conditions, the manufacturer would have to undercut his competitors, and that would mean further reduction of wages and still more efficient machinery, consequently again in the long run, fewer people able to buy what he was making. This situation had already produced a jam and a depression about every ten years; and the only way for the manufacturer to get a reprieve from the vicious cycle was to find new foreign markets for his prodcuts - an escape which would not save him in the long run" (pg. 313).

Back to the topic of the Jews. Wilson's comparison between the marginlization of the Jews in Europe and the marginalization of the proletariat is instructive.

"...proletarian children, as Engels had said, were not aware that they were unfortunate or unhappy because they had never known anything else; whereas the Jews, though their outlook had been narrow, had been accustomed to intellectual traning" (pg. 314).

This may actually explain the attractiveness of socialism to European Jewry and the presence of Jews, like Trotsky and Zinoviev, at the forefront of the Marxist struggle. For, of the proletarian Wilson writes:

"The men who employed him had an interest in keeping him ignortant. By vertue of his very position, he was deprived of the things that would enable him to rise to a higher status. The mediaeval dissabilities of the Jew were in the nature of a mere national accident; the disabilities of the proletarian were disabilities indissoluble from his class" (pg. 314).

My favorite part of the book is Wilson's discussion of Lenin. While Wilson certainly glosses over the negative aspects of Lenin's personal life and philosophy, his comments on Lenin's Marxism are definitely worth highlighting.

Lenin's political philsophy, Wilson writes,

"grew out of his intellecutual enmity toward the striving for petty ends, toward out-and-out pragmatism, and toward all that is ideologically without form and theoretically ungeneralized" (pg. 430).

There is also an honest critique of Lenin's authoritarianism.

"[H]e is quite clear about the intellectual inequalities between the intelligentsia and the masses. He quotes in What Is to Be Done? as 'profoundly true and important' a statement by karl Katusky to the effect that the proletariat, left to itself, can never arrive at socialism; socialism must be brought them from above: 'the vehicles of science are not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia.' And 'our very first and most pressing duty...is to help turn out worker -  revolutionists on the same level in regard to party activity as intellectual revolutionists" (pg. 387).

" 'All power to the Soviets' had never really meant what it said and that it had soon been exchanged by lenin for 'All power to the Bolshevik Party'"(pg. 431).

Though written over seventy years ago, the following phrase shows Lenin to be more relevant to American politics than ever before:

"In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin characterizes Russia as 'a politically enslaved state, in which nine hundred and ninety-nine of the inhabitants have been corrupted to the marrow of their bones by political subservience and by a complete incomprehsension of party honor and party ties'" (pg. 388).

Just switch out Russia for America, and you definitely have a voice that might add something to contemporary political discourse!

These aren't all the passages I want to highlight, but unfortunately I neglected to note every passage of interest in my copy of the book.

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.