Quotes of the Day - April 25, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin identifies generational conflict in Kafka's writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, Benjamin's statements work well as aphorisms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is also a specific way of interacting with art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________________________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes of the Day - April 4, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes of the Day - April 1, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The process of the feminization of labor is as follows:

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

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

Factors shaping the feminization of labor include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some claim flexibility represents emancipatory potential. Virno disagrees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In immaterial capitalism, industry must "informalize":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating Community: Reflections of a BCA Senior

Community exists at BCA, but it’s hard to spot under the piles of homework and intense pressure to perform. The task of the BCA student must be to unearth it.

There is a whole host of phrases someone like me – a senior with his eyes towards college – could recite to students who have another couple of years to go at BCA. Phrases like “hang in there!” Or “learn for the sake of learning!” Or “take the classes you enjoy!” And while all of these phrases are partly true, there is something else that gets lost amidst the platitudes: community - to give and teach as well as to receive and learn.

At a highly competitive school it is hard forge a sense of solidarity with fellow students. We are told, even before we know if we’ll be attending this school, to approach our peers as challengers. From the morning we walk into the auditorium to take the entrance exam to the evening we celebrate our graduation, the educational model in which we learn teaches us to think of our classmates as adversaries. This logic permeates every aspect of school life. Students begin to think: my acceptance to the college of my choice is predicated upon the rejection of my classmates by that college. Yet, it isn’t just the sinister college process that pits students against each other. The hyper-competitive ethos declares: getting an A on a test means that my peers cannot get As too. Praise of a student from a teacher must come with the censure of another student. Such an educational environment makes community impossible and construes collaboration as anathema, or even something subversive.

This kind of educational environment is oppressive, not because it is coercive or limiting, but because it demands from students constant vigilance. Every moment, every test, quiz, or project is a competition – one small battle in the fight to obtain the treasured acceptance letter from an Ivy League school. These stakes are high, so we are constantly desperate and always striving to outdo even our closest friends.

It is true that the teachers and administrators do not want us to live with such rivalry. And I’m sure they frown, just as anyone would, when students refuse collaborate out of malice – like when someone refuses to tell a friend who has just been absent what the homework was. I know the administration shudders to think that on occasion, students attempt to sabotage their peers out of fear that cooperation will limit their chances for academic success. But only the students can really change the school environment; all teachers and administrators can do is help.

For those of you with time left at BCA, the opportunity to create an intellectual community still exists. I encourage you to reject the educational paradigm that forces us to work against our peers and I urge you to promote the values of cooperation and camaraderie instead. If I knew what I know now about the college process and the rigors of BCA, I would have worked harder, not on my studies, but on cultivating a sense of community within my grade and in the broader school environment. It turned out, after all I was told by college emails, parents, test-prep books, and teachers, that my success was not at all contingent on my classmates’ failures. We all, especially this year’s senior class, did quite well. If anything, imagine what could be accomplished with greater cooperation between students. Just think: working together on homework would provide us with a ready-made social forum and a better understanding of the lessons taught in class. Study groups would make large, high stakes tests seem lest daunting and the process of studying less isolative. Sharing information about due dates for assignments and questions would alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with taking a rigorous course-load. Discussion groups for readings would enliven class time, and sharing notes would make difficult subjects less mystifying. There would be more time for wonder, research, and independent inquiry – the pillars of an intellectual community.

We achieve more, not less, when we work together. We are happier when friends and classmates aren’t enemies or teammates on an opposing team. When you are in class, look at the student next to you – friend, acquaintance, or stranger – not as an obstacle or challenger on your path to success but as a potential intellectual partner of even a confidant. Think of your fellow student as someone who can share in your journey through high school. I no longer have the ability to make this happen. But you still do.  

***

This post was originally published in the school newspaper, at http://www.academychronicle.com/opinion/creating-community-bca-senior-reflects. BCA stands for the Bergen County Academies, a public magnet high school in New Jersey.

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.

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.

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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.