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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May Day Reflections - One Week Later

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

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

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

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

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

Police fire on protesters blocking an intersection

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

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

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

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

Quotes of the Day - April 25, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin identifies generational conflict in Kafka's writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, Benjamin's statements work well as aphorisms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is also a specific way of interacting with art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________________________________________________________________

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

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:

"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.

A Brief Foray Into Religion - Ritual Without Belief: What is it Good For?

A teacher once told me that my refusal to pray was childish. My insistence on believing in the literal meanings of the word I said when I prayed, he argued, was immature. The ability to say the prayers and recognize their inherent contradictions, but still say them was, for him, the mark of maturity. A child cannot live with contradiction; he or she demands complete logical and moral consistency. Yet an adult - a mature and reasonable person - can live with contradiction and cognitive dissonance. Yes, a contradiction arises when one observes ritual without believing in god. However, a truly mature person has the capacity to deal with that contradiction, and thus practices ritual anyway.

At the time, this sounded reasonable. It made the case for practicing ritual without belief fairly well. But I soon wanted something more certain, something more purposeful. If I wasn't going to engage in ritual observance for a deity, I wanted to do it for a reason. Ritual observance, I decided, would only be worth practicing if it was responsible for the genius of the "non-Jewish Jew." To this end, I found counsel in an article by an old socialist writer and historian.

In Isaac Deutscher's "Message of the Non-Jewish Jew", he defines the "non-Jewish Jew" as someone who transcends Jewry, and in many instances rejects it, while still belonging to a Jewish tradition. Deutscher argues that major thinkers of Jewish descent - Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxembourg, and Trotsky - were able to revolutionize the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics because of their special positions on the margins of society.

"They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs...They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respsecive nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thoguht above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons far into the future."

This unique place of the Jew in society that Deutscher describes is attained through ritual observance. Jewish ritual observance in the diaspora is a kind of self-ghettoization - a form of separation from surrounding society. The Jew is part of society, as he participates economically and socially in the country and community in which he lives. Yet, at the same time, the Jew is recognized as different and separate from the dominant religious group or even nationality. He is set apart by the laws of kashrut and by the obligation to keep the Sabbath, among many other things.  This allows Jews to be "each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it." By virtue of this in-and-out dualism, the aforementioned "non-Jewish Jews"  had all this in common, "that the very conditions in which they lived did not allow them to reconcile themselves to ideas which were nationally or religiously limited." Ritual observance is what places the Jew on the borderlines of civilizations- part of one society, but at the same time not truly part of that society.

The separateness of the Jew from society allows him to critique and challenge, and perhaps even alter society and its institutions."Those who are shut in within one society, one nation, or one religion tend to imagine that their way of life and their way of thought have absolute and unchangeable validity and that all that contradicts their standards is somehow 'unnatural,' inferior or evil. Those on the other hand, who live on the borderlines of various civilizations comprehend more clearly the great movement and the great contradictoriness of society." The Jew who transcends his Judaism is thus perfectly equipped to comprehend and reorder society.

The rationale for ritual practice without belief and continued Jewish text study is that it is necessary for the creation of future social critics and figures who are willing to challenge and eventually alter the status quo. I now have reason to observe religious tradition without believing in a word I say when I daven. But more curiously, I now have reason to be concerned about Jewish continuity. If knowledge of tradition, texts, and ritual is eroded, from where will the next great "non-Jewish Jewish" thinkers come?