"...at least one philosophy course, and, more adequately two, should be required of every undergraduate. Of course an education of this kind would require a major shift in our resources and priorities, and, if successful, it would produce in our students habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world. But to unfit our students for the contemporary world ought in any case to be one of our educational aims." - Alasdair MacIntyre
Monday, December 7, 2009
Sexism, Racism and Liberal Political Thought
Consider for a moment how often we encounter "post-racist" and "post-feminist" ideologies. On the one hand, they acknowledge some version of the claim that history is marked by racism and sexism. On the other, both claim that contemporary societies are no longer encumbered by sexism or racism: we now live in a more or less post-racist, post-sexist social order.
Now to the extent that liberal political thought tends to hang its hat on a private/public distinction, it seems to me that it is bound up with the maintenance of the ideology sketched above. Moreover, the liberal tradition (broadly construed so as not to connote the idiosyncratic American sense of the term) has tended to focus intensely on legal and political institutions in lieu of critically engaging ostensibly "private" institutions such as the family, the workplace, the church, schools, clubs and organizations, culture, media and so on. And insofar as this is true, the relationship between "post" ideologies and liberalism should be even clearer.
We should therefore find it suspicious that the women's liberation movement and what is now called the "Civil Rights Movement" are remembered today as more or less legally-oriented and conventionally political movements. The slogan "the personal is political" couldn't be further from the way that feminism is construed today in many mainstream appropriations of the women's movement: today feminism is described as though it ought to be a politics that prizes "choice" above all else. Thus, "private choices" are once again apolitical: it is the job of post-feminism to shield ostensibly private matters from the political scrutiny they received from second and third-wave feminists.
Today, my sense is that the women's liberation movement is remembered as a movement aiming merely to achieve certain legal changes. The same is true of the way that the Civil Rights Movement (as indicated by its label) is remembered: it was just a movement aiming to eliminate certain racist laws and to enforce voting rights.
But as Angela Davis points out, it wasn't clear during the 1950s and 60s that what was under way was a "Civil Rights Movement". Davis claims that in those days, among her comrades in SNCC it was known simply as the "Freedom Movement". While certain legal reforms were obviously part of the movement's goals, it is far from obvious that this exhausted its aims. In fact, the history of the movement itself suggests that the legalistic re-reading of history is dubious.
Consider first of all that the main locus of disagreement between the ostensibly more "moderate" MLK and the more radical Malcolm X (religious differences notwithstanding) was essentially one of tactics, i.e. not in the first instance one of divergent emancipatory aims. Furthermore, even MLK's politics do not fit within the narrow legalistic reading of the movement: MLK was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, American Imperialism abroad and Cold War foreign policy, and he argued forcefully in the last years of his life that the fight against racism was also at the same time a fight against certain socio-economic conditions. We'd need to fundamentally re-think the basic social and economic institutions in capitalist societies, MLK held, in order to have any hope of successfully smashing racism.
But given that this is the case, what does this suggest about the viability of post-racist and post-sexist ideologies? As I see it, there are 3 important conclusions to draw here.
(1) One conclusion that seems clear to me is that these "post" ideologies depend first of all on a re-interpretation of the historical meaning of social struggles. In other words, a condition of thinking that these "post" narratives have any plausibility is that we first of all believe that the goals of the Women's Movement and the CRM were purely legal.
(2) Another conclusion is that the distinction between "de facto" and "de jure" oppression or domination has been obscured by the prevalence of liberal ways of thinking about politics. The point of the distinction is to distinguish between de jure forms of domination that are literally written into the word of law (e.g. aspects of Jim Crow) on the one hand, and de facto forms of domination that derive from non-legal features of social institutions and norms. Thomas McCarthy, in drawing a parallel between what he calls "neoracism" and "neoimperialism" draws the distinction as follows.
"Whereas neoimperialism is a way of maintaining key aspects of colonial domination and exploitation after the disappearance of colonies in the legal-political sense, neoracism is a way of doing the same for racial domination and exploitation after the disappearance of "race" in the scientific-biological sense... just as postcolonial neoimperialism could outlive the demise of former colonies, post-biological neoracism could survive the demise of scientific racism... and just as the shift to neoimperialism required modes of domination and exploitation that were compatible with the nominal independence and equality of all nations, the shift to neoracism required modes that were compatible with the formal freedom and equality of all individuals."(Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development. (2009: Cambridge UP)
(3) And a final conclusion to draw from this phenomenon is as follows. In order to find the 'post' ideologies compelling we must also have an individualist way of thinking about society and politics. After all, the familiar post-racist claim goes something like this: in the past there used to be explicit, de jure forms of discrimination that were restrictive. But now that these de jure forms of oppression have been lifted, there is no fetter on the ability of individuals (of any gender or race) to "succeed" in making a lot of money if they simply work hard enough. And of course, like working-class people of all backgrounds, I would not contest the claim that in principle, it is possible that any one of them could become the next Bill Gates. Of course, even conceding this trivial claim, we should note here that this individual possibility does not obscure the fact that it must also be true (for the 'individual' claim to work) that the working class is collectively unfree to leave the working-class. In other words, while it is true in some trivial sense that any one person "could" hit it big, it must also be true in capitalism that everyone in the working-class couldn't hit it big at the same time. Capitalism requires that a large mass of working-class people whose cheap labor make the wealth of a small class of people possible. Massive improbability notwithstanding, it is also conceptually impossible within capitalism for everyone to become Bill Gates all at once, since there would be nobody doing the socially-necessary labor that sustains capitalism.
The result is that focusing on the possibilities that a generic "individual" has for social mobility says nothing of the way that the entire society, writ large, is structured. For if the "individual claim" is only true in a situation in which lots of other people are restricted from leaving an oppressed status, then it amounts to very little in the way of dispelling claims that racism, sexism and class oppression are important features of the present.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
More than 1/3 of Young Black Men Unemployed
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
On Claude Levi-Strauss and the Structuralists
Louis Proyect has a great post up about the recently deceased anthropologist and founder of structuralism, Claude Levi-Strauss.
Great reflections on the relationships between optimism, doubt, Marxism, and history.
California Tuition to Rise 32 Percent
That's right. The NY Times has the story here.
This is so disastrous. If the American Dream had been available before, it is certainly gone now.
Update: I should make it clear California students aren't taking this lying down. UCLA students have occupied a building on campus (Unclear if they're still in there as of today).
Updated update: Students occupying a building at Berkeley in protest as well.
H/T to Austin Thompson.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The Politics of Characterizing Capitalism
My sparse posting over the past few months is mostly due to my recent immersion into graduate school, where, among encountering many new intellectual trajectories, I've encountered serious and self-proclaimed post-modernists for the first time. I've dabbled in Foucault, Butler, Lyotard, Joan Scott, and a few others. As I've done this reading I've had a critical eye for suggestions that we completely abandon the material or historical in pursuit of the discursive, and been extra critical of many post-modernists' outright rejection of metanarratives and grand theories. I am a Marxist, after all.
But I've also been interested in what these theorists have to offer in terms of interventions. It doesn't take a lot of arguing to convince me that the way we talk about things can contribute to maintaining existing structures of power. Foucault, for instance, argues that merely accepting the narrative that sexuality is repressed in our society, even if you wish to transgress that repression, is perpetuating the dominant narrative of sexuality by affording it absolute power in defining the discourse on sexuality.
But when it comes to the anti-capitalist project, knowing how the discursive might be used to interrupt capitalism is less clear. Certainly, one might try to simply de-normalize capitalism by actively challenging the naturalness or common sense-ness of capitalist values. That's a rhetorical move, yes. But how far does that go to actually challenge capitalism?
Then I read J.K. Gibson-Graham's article "(Queer)ying Capitalism in the Classroom." In the article, a la Foucault, Gibson-Graham argues that accepting the narrative of capitalism (when she teaches feminist economics, mind you) as a fully global, dominant, behemoth system reproduces the idea that capitalism is the only system possible in today's context, on the one hand, and a system one cannot resist, on the other.
Gibson Graham's rhetorical project around capitalism is tied directly to the direction of queer theory:
Of course, destabilising images of capitalist dominance is a big project, and I could not do it by myself. Nor could I do it without queer theory, that in credibly dynamic matrix of contemporary theory whose practitioners are not only theorising about queers but who are also making social theory `queer’. This latter project can be seen to involve not (or not merely) constituting a minority population based on same-sex desire, set in opposition to a heterosexual norm, but calling into question the very idea of norms and normality, calling attention to the violence entailed by normalising impulses, including the impulse to theorise a social site assumed to a hegemonic order [7].Certainly, since capitalism is the normative discourse in our society, even admitting as much and calling it a discourse (rather than the assumed natural order), is a radical move for many people. But what Gibson-Graham makes us question is whether the desire to portray capitalism as the defining characteristic of our society contributes to its position as such. She mentions then employing different projects in her classes where her classes explore non-capitalist models of production taking place in U.S. society. This both de-normalizes capitalism, by showing alternatives, and interrupts the idea that the normative discourse is actually normal.
What if we were to `queer ’ capitalist hegemony and break apart some of its consolidating associations? We could start by reimagining the body of capitalism, that hard and masculine body that penetrates non-capitalism but is not itself susceptible to penetration (this image conveys some of the heterosexism that structures contemporary social theory). One key `coming together’ (a Christmas effect that participates in consolidating a capitalist monolith) is the familiar association of capitalism with commodification and `the market’. This association, in which all three terms ultimately signify `capitalism’, constitutes the body of capitalism as dominant and expansive (at least in the space of commodity transactions). But how might we re-envision that body as more open and permeable, as having orifices through which non-capitalism might enter? We might argue, as many have done, that many different relations of production, including slavery and independent commodity production and col lective or communal relations are compatible with production for a market. What violence do we do to these when we normalise all commodity production as capitalist commodity production? Surely the market is a mobile and membranous orifice into which can be inserted all kinds of non-capitalist commodities, whose queer presences challenge the preeminence of capitalism and the discourses of its hegemony.
But, does this cause us to understate capitalism's real power? Do we need to portray capitalism as inescapable to relate how much power it has over the lives of those who would resist it? And, how would one implement this kind of discursive move outside the classroom (where most of us do the majority of our talking about capitalism with other people)?
Monday, November 16, 2009
Inspiring the youth, placating the authorities
From the headline of a recent NYTimes article:
At a town hall meeting, President Obama’s answers stood out as a stark snapshot of a his efforts to reach China’s youth while not offending its authorities.Was this not precisely what Obama did in the US as well, before and after the election?
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Four Perspectives on the Fall of the Wall
Here are three articles from a SocialistWorker.org series on the fall of the wall. Here is Slavoj Zizek's take on it in the NYTimes.
One of the more poignant moment's of Zizek's piece was when he said that:
When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves a second chance.
I think this is precisely what gets drowned out in the triumphalism that continues to accompany most cheering about the fall of East-Bloc Stalinism. That, even today, we can still hardly articulate a position outside of prescribed disjunctions like "East or West", "Communism or Freedom", etc. should strike us as deeply problematic.
The fall of the wall dividing Berlin means so many things, but any critical assessment of these ramifications would not operate within the facile logic of east vs. west, communism vs. 'freedom'. Here I am tempted to recall a similarly complicated political situation that receives similar treatment in mainstream outlets: the political situation with Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
Without any doubt whatsoever, Mugabe's regime is violent, oppressive, self-serving and largely ineffective. But any critical account of the entire situation in Zimbabwe would include a lot more than the failings chalked up to the actions of the current regime and its leader. It would include engagement with the legacy of colonialism, the neo-colonialism of Britain's post-Independence economic interactions with Zimbabwe, the relationship of Mugabe's regime to global capitalism, the concrete configuration of power within Zimbabwe before and after independence, the continued existence of high concentrations of economic power in the hands of colonial elites, and so on.
But complicating the political dynamics is not possible within the framework foisted upon us in outlets like the Economist or the NY Times. There we are told that the politics are simple: The West is good, Mugabe is bad... which translates to: more neoliberalism is the prescription, the ZANU-PF and land reform are the disease. This is why certain British outlets are so pleased to hear about everything going terribly wrong in Zimbabwe, for it gives credence to what they've wanted to claim all along: that Zimbabwe "isn't ready" for self-rule and needs to to be brought in line by means of neo-colonial economic domination.
Something similar, I feel, is true of our confrontation with the history of the Soviet Union. It's easy for the media to simply give us a redux of the triumphant, clamoring cheers proclaiming a new world of unbridled capitalism that followed the events of 1989. It's easy to continue to use the demise of the East Bloc (or the degenerated worker's states, state capitalist regimes... whatever you like) to cast doubt upon any alternative to capitalism. But the world has never been as simple and clear cut as "east vs. west". Today, not to feel at all ambivalent about what died with the East Bloc is to accept a kind of cynicism that, perhaps, in 1991 was forgivable, but today reemerges as one of the most suffocating legacies of the Cold War. As Adorno put it in another context: "freedom would not be to choose between black and white, but to abjure such prescribed choices".
Whatever else is true of American collective memory and the fall of the wall, it is not unreasonable that many Germans who lived in the DDR aren't satisfied with 20 years of capitalism they've been thrown into as part of their liberation. This jibes with the Zizek quote at the beginning of the post: those protesting the East Bloc regimes did not ask for economic shock therapy, criminal privatizations of public assets, or the ruthless competition of capitalist social relations. The situation was and continues to be a complicated one.
Why, in the 20th century, have the most heroic popular uprisings, the most persistent wars of liberation, the most indisputable mobilizations in the name of justice and liberty all ended… in opaque statist constructions wherein none of the factors that gave meaning and possibility to their historical genesis is decipherable?... we must categorically reject the refrain of all those who imagine themselves being able to settle this question with a few evasive replies on totalitarian ideology since it is apparent that they have simply abandoned the ideas of justice and the emancipation of humanity and instead joined the eternal cohort of conservatives bent on preserving the ‘lesser evil’The rejoinder of the "eternal cohort of conservatives" claims that to be open to radically re-thinking the organization of contemporary societies is not only a fruitless enterprise (since all alternatives to capitalism are worse), but also a dangerous one that threatens the modest accomplishments and stability of the present state of affairs.
But this conservative reply to any serious attempt to imagine a different kind of society makes an invalid inference. While it may be true that we are best served to accept the least worst alternative in the meantime, this bare admission does not cast any suspicion on the perpetual, unending struggle to try to find an systemic alternative to the present that is far more just, and far less violent and exploitative.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Leftists in Germany Protest Berlin Wall Anniversary
While a majority of Europeans and Americans prepared to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this weekend, some German leftists are instead protesting what they call the "freedom of capitalist competition" that came with the fall of the wall.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Against Electoral Politics
What is politics? What is the terrain of the political? What's at stake?
Ask many people these questions and their answers will understandably point to Washington, elections, Democrats, Republicans and so on. Having an interest in politics, on this view, means watching CNN, following the inane daily hubbub on Capitol Hill, etc.
But, as Alain Badiou astutely points out, "If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure."
This is a fecund observation that is worth unpacking further.
First, consider the definition of politics offered above. What should the raison d'etre of our electoral institutions be, if not to facilitate collective decision-making, organized by certain principles, aiming to unfold the new possibilities currently repressed by the dominant state of affairs?
Yet this is patently not what electoral politics are about in the US. Here, elections are about an endless, narrow dialectic between Democrat and Republican parties. Consider for a moment what this dialectic is not: it is not a struggle between different substantive political visions. Nor is it a disagreement over how a just social order would be organized. It is a prescribed choice between two different pro-business entities. Politics, if it has any place in this process at all, is merely a small, incidental side-effect.
It is helpful here to consider revisiting debates from the early 20th century on the Left about tactics, strategy, and elections.
At the very beginning of the 20th century, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the strongest Marxist, left-wing party in the world. The SPD's theoretical wing was led by Karl Kautsky, a fiercely dogmatic defender of parliamentary democracy as a strategic means for constructing a socialist society.
An interesting debate was instigated by a polemical brochure entitled "Terrorism and Communism", penned by Kautsky, directed at discrediting the tactical and strategic trajectory of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Trotsky wrote a reply in 1920 with the same title, that was later published as a book (republished recently by Verso).
For Kautsky, the debate is one of "democracy" versus "dictatorship". He casts his view as the democratic alternative to the violent, impetuous and "authoritarian" methods of the Bolsheviks. But the crucial question here has got to be: what does Kautsky mean by democracy?
He means a representative parliamentary system coupled with a capitalist organization of social and economic life. In other words, he conflates democracy as such with a certain kind of electoral procedure situated in the context of a particular configuration of capitalism. In short, he conflates certain lifeless procedures with the conditions in which they are implemented.
Trotsky's reply (and we might add here that Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin and others shared this view) is that we cannot speak of democracy at all unless we thematize the conditions of its possibility. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in the foreword to the recent Verso edition of Trotsky's text:"For Trotsky the true stakes of the debate are not simply democracy versus dictatorship, but the class 'dictatorship' which is inscribed into the very form of parliamentary dictatorship.... the true question is... how the very field in which the total political process takes place is structured."
In other words, the question has got to be: what extra-electoral conditions would have to obtain in order for democracy to be realized?
But surely some will object here that if this is Trotsky's view, then why does he use the language of 'dictatorship'? This objection, however, misses the mark. Trotsky does not use the language of dictatorship as a concept opposed to democracy; in other words, his question is not 'democracy vs. dictatorship'. What Kautsky blithely dubs "democracy" as such, Trotsky calls a form of dictatorship. In other words, parliamentary democracy under capitalism is, for Trotsky, a form of class "dictatorship". This is analogous to Rosa Luxembourg's distinction between "bourgeois democracy" and "socialist democracy", where the idea is that the social/economic conditions under which a vote is exercised is crucial.
Let me try to spell this out a little more clearly. If Trotsky and other Marxists are correct to define capitalism as a mode of social organization in which the major productive resources and institutions are privately owned by a specific class (rather than democratically, by all), then we must conclude that parliamentary procedures are compatible with a high concentration of undemocratic economic power. Another way to put the point is to lean on Marx's distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation. For Marx, the transition from feudalism to liberal capitalism represented a great step forward in that it granted a larger degree of "political" (read "legal", "electoral") equality than in Feudalism or Antiquity. But, Marx held, political emancipation is not enough; the bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism didn't go far enough. Democracy should be extended not only to political/legal institutions, but to social and economic institutions as well.
Thus, if you're committed to human emancipation, if you're committed to radically rethinking economic and social organization, Trotsky's worry is that you cannot accomplish this within the parameters of parliamentary procedures under capitalism.
Here's the argument for why this might be the case. Holders of economic power can make use of this power outside of the electoral arena. Capitalists can make threats. They lay off politically active workers that are 'trouble makers', they can move their operations to other places, they can close factories, they can threaten democratically-elected governments with disinvestment, layoffs, etc. They may purchase and privately control and own media institutions. Economic power is not relinquished without a fight. And even when regulations and limits are imposed upon capitalists, they will relentlessly deploy their economic power to game the system and find ways to get the limits and regulations repealed. Witness the slicing and dicing of the regulatory apparatus put in place in the 1930s over the period from 1973-present. It took a while, but their incessant pressure and efforts eventually paid off.
It is also crucial to point out here that the struggle to reconfigure economic power via electoral institutions never occurs on a level, fair playing field. This struggle always occurs within a social formation already organized around concentrations of class power. Moreover, even when a progressive left-wing government is elected, it runs up against the entrenched extra-electoral power of capitalists. An instructive case study here is socialist head of state Salvador Allende in Chile circa 1970-73.
Allende was elected by a broad coalition of center-left and left-wing parties in Chile amidst uproar from the landed elites and ruling classes in Chile. When Allende tried to reform economic institutions and put land reform into law, his efforts were stonewalled and sabotaged by economic elites who used their power to "go on strike", lay off workers, suffocate the economy and try to bring the country to its knees.
Multinational corporations in Chile such as the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) set to work quickly to fight against Allende, and they weren't interested in trying to win the battle over electoral terms (a battle, the company's owners realized, they'd have little way of winning in the face of a broad popular mandate for Allende's policies). We now know from memos circulated amongst elites in ITT and the American-owned Kennecott Copper Company that their goals were to "“to strangle the Chilean economy, sow panic, and foment social disorder in order to encourage and create the opportunity for the armed forces to step in and replace Allende". Also- their influence convinced the US and related institutions like the World Bank to impose an economic blockade on Chile to help the destabilization effort.
The point of this is that all of these efforts were effective against a democratically-elected representative government precisely because of the concentrations of economic power under capitalism. Admittedly, "dictatorship" somewhat overstates the case, but the Allende case makes the point that this stranglehold on productive, economic power by a small class must be challenged for democracy to be possible.
The upshot of all of this is something like the following. Either you are open to the reconfiguration of social/economic organization or you are not. If you are, as socialists purport to be, then you cannot be dogmatically committed to the narrow strategy of merely trying to elect certain people within predetermined parameters (e.g. Democrat or Republican). You must be committed to a broader conception of political activism, one that embraces extra-electoral struggles (strikes (conventional, sit-down, wildcat, etc.), community organization, grass-roots protest and demonstration, sit-ins, etc.) as a means to alter the entire political center of gravity. In other words, the goal of a progressive social movement is not to merely operate within narrowly circumscribed procedures prescribed by the existing order, but to dynamically create the conditions for its own success.
We've recently lived through a massive change in electoral holdings of power. In 2004, people were talking about a "permanent Republican majority". Four years later, the GOP has lost control of both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, while the Democratic majority in the Senate sky-rocketed to 60. But for all this massive changing in electoral terms, the political content of the change (as we see today) is extremely thin. The continuity between the last days of the Bush government and the Obama administration is extremely discouraging. Foreign policy has essentially stayed the same. Regulation of financial markets is about as forthcoming under Obama as under Bush in 2008. The response to the crisis of giving spectacularly large amounts of welfare to Wall Street was virtually the same under Paulson as under Geithner, in fact the "Paulson Plan" was implemented lock stock and barrell under the latter's tenure. After all of these massive interventions to save the assets of powerful economic elites, Obama even had the audacity to talk of the importance of "market solutions" and the "private sector" when discussing health care. The message was clear: massive government spending for economic elites will be forthcoming and plentiful, but all we've got fo the majority of the population is the thin gruel of laissez-faire.
Aside from snagging a bit of low-hanging fruit (raising the minimum wage, redirecting some much-needed, overdue funds into education and infrastructure), the Obama administration has not deviated from the course taken by Bush. For all the talk of change, this has been a rather smooth transition from 8 years of Bush compared to what, in electoral terms, was a major alteration of course.
What further proof do we need that the end-in-view must not be "getting Democrats elected"? Whatever else is true, the Civil Rights Act was not passed by a drive merely to "get the right people elected". Neither do not have Social Security or unemployment benefits because of electoral fetishism.
Rather than being a means of change, current Federal elections in the US are a way of staving off real change. We must not forget that the large swells of community energy, activism and volunteerism that was poured into getting Obama elected reflected real needs and real discontent with the existing order. The heartbreaking reality, however, is that the election of Obama siphoned off all of this important energy and defused it.
The question we are confronted with is: now that this swell of energy and excitement has been betrayed, what can be accomplished within the parameters of electoralism? Do we have an electoral means of holding those in power accountable? However we answer, no honest response could have anything to do with getting more Democrats elected or with staving off a Republican backlash.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Excellent Paul Krugman article on Health Care
It's an oldie but a goodie. Read it here.
Here's a basic statement of one fundamental irrationality in our private health insurance system:
Can you see how these deep-seated structural problems with private insurance will be solved either by the current 'reform' bill, or by a 'public option'? Neither can I.[T]he only way modern medical care can be made available to anyone other than the very rich is through health insurance. Yet it's very difficult for the private sector to provide such insurance, because health insurance suffers from a particularly acute case of a well-known economic problem known as adverse selection. Here's how it works: imagine an insurer who offered policies to anyone, with the annual premium set to cover the average person's health care expenses, plus the administrative costs of running the insurance company. Who would sign up? The answer, unfortunately, is that the insurer's customers wouldn't be a representative sample of the population. Healthy people, with little reason to expect high medical bills, would probably shun policies priced to reflect the average person's health costs. On the other hand, unhealthy people would find the policies very attractive.
You can see where this is going. The insurance company would quickly find that because its clientele was tilted toward those with high medical costs, its actual costs per customer were much higher than those of the average member of the population. So it would have to raise premiums to cover those higher costs. However, this would disproportionately drive off its healthier customers, leaving it with an even less healthy customer base, requiring a further rise in premiums, and so on.
Insurance companies deal with these problems, to some extent, by carefully screening applicants to identify those with a high risk of needing expensive treatment, and either rejecting such applicants or charging them higher premiums. But such screening is itself expensive. Furthermore, it tends to screen out exactly those who most need insurance.
The often-repeated mantra on the "center left" that we need to sit down, crunch numbers, and try anything and everything that might "work" is disingenuous. All of this faux-pragmatist garbage from Obama is not only false, but patronizing. We don't need to sit around and listen to 'all the best ideas' and continue to be 'open minded'. We need to realize that the 'conversation' going on right now isn't a discussion among fair-minded participants all aiming at getting things right; the 'conversation' is merely a proxy for a political struggle between divergent interests (e.g. maintaining the economic power of some vs. realizing universalizable interests like securing universal coverage).
The "pragmatic" truth here is that it is obvious what a rational, just, efficient health care system would look like. Despite the complications introduced into the discussion by Obama and co., this is not a complicated issue whatsoever. The only complicated question here should be how to most effectively fight against powerful industry interests and free-market fundamentalism.
Here's a simple question that we are publicly barred from asking: what purpose should our health care institutions serve? In other words, what should be the raison d'etre of insurance as an institution?
Answer: to provide the best quality health care to the greatest number of people for the lowest cost.
This seems painfully obvious. But think about what this 'purpose' is not: ensuring that doctors and hospitals earn maximally high amounts of money, ensuring that the interests of health industry investors are put above all else, etc.
The first principle of insurance is that the larger the pool of people inside, the lower the risk for all. A trivial feature of market exchanges is that when you buy in larger quantities, you get lower prices because you have more bargaining power as a consumer. Whole-sale is cheaper than retail.
The obvious next step would be to conclude that a rational and efficient health insurance scheme would include everyone (to minimize risk) and would use its massive purchasing power to get better deals with health providers. In other words, the obvious conclusion is that single-payer is the most rational and efficient means of attaining the ends identified above as the purpose of health insurance (to cover the most people for the lowest cost). The fact that single-payer would completely eliminate the absurd bureaucratic waste (from screening, advertising, unnecessary forms, overhead, etc.) required by having tons of different private insurers is only icing on the cake.
Here's another question: what is the purpose or raison d'etre of the massively fragmented web of private insurance companies that constitute a large bulk of our system?
Answer: they exist to make profit for those who own them, full stop.
The incentives driving the organizational structure and actions of these institutions are reducible to a drive to make money. Everything else is instrumental in realizing that obvious goal. What benefits the system may yield for some are merely incidental.
Why then is anyone surprised that our health system does such a terrible job? It isn't even designed to do what any reasonable person agrees is the raison d'etre of health insurance. But what it is designed to do, it does quite well.
Getting upset that our health insurance system is 'flawed' is like getting angry at pencil sharpener for not being a toaster.
Our system is irrational, inefficient, unnecessarily labyrinthine, and unjust. A 'reform' effort that countenances any of these profound problems is anything but. As Krugman put it in 2006:
So what will really happen to American health care? Many people in this field believe that in the end America will end up with national health insurance, and perhaps with a lot of direct government provision of health care, simply because nothing else works. But things may have to get much worse before reality can break through the combination of powerful interest groups and free-market ideology.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Where's the Obama-era's Huey Long?
Or, for that matter, Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X?
Liberals often take for granted the fierce extra-electoral political struggles that resulted in the pieces of legislation they most cherish. What's lost in this strangely sanguine view of our recent history is that in crucial moments of the 20th century it was anything but inevitable that bills from the Depression-era Social Security Act legislation to the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be passed.
Both of those examples passed as a result of widespread extra-electoral struggle directed in no way toward getting someone elected. The Social Security Act and the Wagner Act (for all their respective problems, compromises, and flaws) were passed in the midst of an atmosphere of unprecedented labor militancy and civil disobedience (e.g. the Great Textile strike of 1934 and successful general strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis in that same yr.). The passage of these bills is best read as a concession, a partial compromise offered by elites and government leaders in the midst of what was then called 'industrial warfare'. You can bet that these same politicians and business elites would not have either proposed or allowed the passage of such landmark legislation only 5 years earlier when there was no comparable social struggle or direct action.
Then, to stay on the 1930s example for a moment, there's the case of Huey Long. Long was a powerful, machine politician from Louisiana who'd been governor before becoming a US Senator in the 30s. Long was hardly a radical in many respects, and I must admit that it is partly unfair to compare him to MLK or Malcolm X (the comparison above is only meant to point out the ways in which all three were unrelenting gadflies to established centers of power, whose net result was a leftward shift to the entire political center of gravity).
But whatever else we wish to say about Long, he was substantially Left of FDR (e.g. see his "Share Our Wealth" program proposal) and the New Dealers, so much so that Long earned the public ire of FDR. Had Long not been assassinated 1935, he had a reasonable chance of posing a challenge to FDR's reelection hopes for the Presidency.
The point of all this, though, is that FDR did not just win an election, sit down at a big discussion table and hash out what the 'best ideas' were about policy. The policies passed during his tenure were all conditioned by external and internal political struggles. His first term, in particular, lacked any identifiable ideological coherence and was a hodge-podge of different approaches that belied a host of internal struggles within the Administration itself.
Huey Long was one of the few within the Congress to powerfully challenge FDR's policies from the Left. And although FDR hated long and publicly slandered him (FDR once called him the "second most dangerous man in America"), the result of Long's challenge from the Left is palpable in ways that the FDR Administration struggled to co-opt and undercut Long on his own ground. If nothing else, Long's Left-wing criticism of a (for that era) centrist President opened up space for discussions that would not have been possible in a political landscape defined solely in terms of the New Dealers and their reactionary Republican counterparts.
Given the amount of white-washing, gentrifying and cynical appropriation that's stripped MLK of even a gasp of radicalism, people easily forget today that MLK was a nationally hated figure at the time of his death. Although this has been cleansed from collective memory- by and large, white America was no friend of MLK during the 1950s and 60s. He was slandered by 'mainstream' magazines and newspapers and denounced as a Stalinist agent in billboards on highways. There was not going to be a national holiday commemorating him in 1968 (incidentally, it was not effortless in the 1980s, either, to pass the MLK holiday legislation either). Moreover- despite being, perhaps, the most progressive president ever to hold office, LBJ was no big MLK fan either. His FBI had the latter under constant surveillance.
But the point is that despite this hatred, resistance and dismissive attitude towards MLK and what he stood for, the whole political terrain was altered by his interventions (and, it's worth point out, his interventions were only intelligible or possible in virtue of a massive social movement that both preceded and exceeded his individual stature). The Civil Rights Act was also a compromise, a concession, granted as the result of direct action, civil disobedience and fierce struggle against the weight of an established way of doing things. Yet, and this is what's crucial, those struggles were not directed toward getting someone elected to office. They weren't hemmed in by the electoral mechanism itself; they were part of strugles that forced those in office to consider their demands.
And it's also important to point out that MLK's relative 'respectability' among mainstream whites in the mid 60s owed enormously to the more uncompromising radicalism of, for instance, Malcolm X. MLK came to be seen as a more 'desirable' compromise to the militant anti-racism of an emerging Black Power movement. And in this way we should perhaps read the small slivers of compromise made in favor of MLK as having partial origins in the more 'threatening' radicalism of others.
What's the point of all of this in the "Obama era"? Well, as I've lamented in recent posts, there is no comparable challenge to Obama from the Left today.
Liberals may complain about Obama's record so far, but this usually stops far short of rejecting the Democratic Party. Moreover, complaints are typically followed quickly with caveats and hedges that aim to show how Obama is 'progressive at heart' who's merely been hemmed in by a conservative political establishment. But even if we accept the dubious lore that Obama is 'truly a progressive at heart' (whatever that might mean), it still seems to me unjustifiable to go on thinking (as many liberals do) that all we need is to elect a couple of more progressive congress members here and there, to send a couple more bucks to moveon.org. What threat does any of this pose to the intransigent conservative forces that weigh so heavily on the direction of the Democratic Party writ large? What demand does this place on those in power? The "Progressive Caucus" in the DP is a marginalized, yet obedient, minority. Moreover, once these ProgCauc people get nice committee appointments they cease to be critical (e.g. Henry Waxman).
Given that the Democratic Party has never been a 'party of the people', given that its most impressive legislative achievements were the result of extra electoral struggle, given that the Democrats have held massive amounts of electoral power for more than a year only to do nothing substantial... given all of this, how can we possibly continue to tell ourselves that worrying about electoral politics as an end in itself is the way out of the mess we're in? In this climate, how can anyone on the Left take the 'politics of lesser evilism' seriously? Yes, the Republican Party is worse and I would not rather they had power right now. But it cannot be the case that all we can do is merely find ways to perpetually forestall the election of Republicans. If that were true, we'd not have, for example, Social Security or the Civil Rights Act.
Most liberals do not want to admit that the thin gruel of 'lesser evilism' is basically all that really makes the Democrats worth their support. This resistance to that thought was nowhere more visible in the enthusiastic support for the Obama campaign and its language of hope, change, etc. For many, it felt good to buy into the Obama phenomenon when the campaign was in full-steam: his rhetoric signaled a departure from the triangulation, centrism, and tepid GOP-lite politics that previous Democratic Candidates since, at least, 1988 had strictly adhered to. It felt good.
But despite the very real desire among the public for a substantial change, this swell of enthusiasm has proved to be little more than an instrument manipulated for the purposes of electing another run of the mill Democrat.
If the Dems admitted how conservative and tepid they really were.... would they still win elections?
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