Nobody could plausibly argue that capitalism is a system operates according to principles of justice. The call to rectify historical injustices (e.g. slavery and its afterlives) registers as little more than noise to an economic mechanism that only speaks the language of profit. Capitalism is an inhuman system in which the demands of capital accumulation act as the steering mechanisms for investment, employment and production. Resources are haphazardly shuffled around in the pursuit of profitable investment opportunities. Human needs as such are not registered by the system's internal logic. Accordingly, where there are no short-term profits to be made, there is no investment or employment. As G.A. Cohen puts it, "The same system that overworks people in the interests of profit, also deprives them entirely of work when its not profitable to employ them."
Enter Detroit. For many, Detroit is synonymous with urban decay, business failure, high unemployment, economic misery, and crumbling infrastructure. Large parts of Detroit are in such bad shape that they appear as though they've been bombed out. Think Europe post-WWII. As TNR notes, "Unemployment in Detroit stands at a staggering 28 percent. And, in key measures of economic vitality in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan regions, Detroit finishes dead last." If you haven't ever been, it's instructive to move about in the city using Google maps street view. What seems like it should be a dense urban area on a map looks like a remote rural area with high grass growing out of broken roads and sidewalks. It's chilling. Moreover, as we've recently learned, 25% of the population of Detroit left the city in the last 10 years. The population is now roughly 700,000 (identical to its 1910 levels, before the auto industry really took off), down from its peak in the 1950s at nearly 2,000,000. Of course, population loss is but one of the many problems facing Detroit and, indeed, it is more a symptom than a cause.
What is the problem? The basic problems are the decline of manufacturing due to capital flight and rapid suburbanization over the last 50 years, but especially after the early 1970s. Why did this happen? Who is to blame?
Global capitalism went into deep crisis in the early 1970s. The long post-WWII boom during which living standards grew modestly for many had come to an end. As David Harvey has pointed out in various places, from a ruling class perspective the crisis of the 1970s was caused in part by the "excessive" power of organized labor. Labor was "too powerful" and was able to bargain too effectively. In other words, labor's power was getting in the way of profitability insofar as trade unions were able to win decent contracts with relatively high wages, good benefits, pensions, and all the rest of it. The power of labor and social movements meant that the state was, relatively speaking, under pressure from below to meet some degree of human needs it had ignored in the past. Moreover, the relative power of the nation state in the global system meant that it was not easy to move capital around globally.
The big problem for the ruling classes in this situation was that they were being taxed too heavily and made to negotiate with labor on terms that were far too close (for the liking of the ruling class) to equality. Mind you it was never anything like "dual power" between labor and capital --capital was always firmly on top-- but even this modestly equitable arrangement was not to the liking of capital once a global recession set in and profits were down across the board. Something had to give.
One strategy was to loosen up immigration controls. Xenophobic immigration barriers were lifted in the US in the 60s in order to try to undercut the bargaining power of organized labor and drive down wages. It didn't work. Thus, the ruling class pushed for the "liberation" of the financial institutions so that they could more easily move capital all over the globe. This enabled off-shoring and outsourcing so that capital could get access to the global "reserve army" of labor. This enabled it to avoid having to face head-on the social power of labor in the advanced capitalist nations. This was later coupled with another strategy: direct assaults on organized labor (e.g. Thatcher vs. the Miners, Reagan vs. PATCO), many of which were very successful in breaking the back of the labor movement for years to come.
These processes lead to the sharp decline of US manufacturing in the 70s. Millions of jobs were lost as the ruling class closed factories, downsized and moved their capital elsewhere. Former industrial centers were reduced to rubble. Those who could afford to move elsewhere in search of work did so, but many were barred from moving.
Suburbanization (which is bound up with this process of de-industrialization) is also a key to understanding this cluster of mutually re-inforcing processes that caused US cities to crumble in the 70s and 80s. Suburbanization, from the very beginning, was always a process shot through with racism and class contradictions. Roughly speaking, suburbanization and all its attendant spin-offs (cars, refrigerators, interstate highways, etc.) underwrote a large degree of the post-war economic growth from 1945-1973. This meant depopulating urban areas (where there were relatively few places to absorb large amounts of surplus capital) and reconfiguring large swaths of people in low-density built environments requiring heavy-car use, all populated by large single-family homes. Suburbanization also dispersed large sections of concentrated working-class populations in dense urban areas, shuffling them to a consumer-dominated social landscape in which public space and the potential for organized revolt were both in short supply.
But, of course, black people were shut out of this new social environment entirely. Federal law as well as extra-legal coercive enforcement mechanisms ensured that this new suburban space would be closed off to all black people, regardless of ability to pay. Federal law also consolidated and reinforced racist attitudes and norms by staking the value of white homeowners' property on there being near-zero levels of black people living in proximity to them (Federal law used a home appraisal system when subsidizing mortgages in which an "A" or "B" rating could only be given in the event the area surrounding the house was less than 2% black... more than that was automatic cause for a low rating). In the context of widespread struggles against racism in the 60s and early 70s, many racist whites decided to flee to the all-white suburbs. To be sure, "white flight" was also a result of the devastating effects of de-industrialization. But there could have been no "black flight" since black people were barred by racist laws, white violence as well as various economic barriers from leaving declining cities for the suburbs. The cumulative effect of punishing poverty, racial oppression, and police brutality ultimately resulted in a series of urban rebellions in the 1960s that shook the urban power structure to the core. Whereas this discontent produced concessions from elites in the 60s, as time went on the strategy from above shifted to one of indifference and abandonment of black populations enraged over the horrible conditions in which they were forced to live. Today, the ruling class only concerns itself with poor urban black populations to the extent that it can criminalize millions of people and shuffle them into the (increasingly profitable) prison-industrial complex.
This is the context in which we must understand Detroit.
What should be clear is that few if any of the causes of misery are peculiar or "internal" to Detroit. And for this reason, the solutions to Detroit's woes cannot be wholly internal; they must come from without. They must, in other words, be part of a much larger mobilization to curb the global economic forces that have sapped the city's ability to flourish. Broken cities don't rebuild themselves, nor do jobs materialize out of thin air. These things require large-scale investments of capital. What Detroit really needs is a Marshall Plan.
As TNR has put it:"Institutions developed at the height of Detroit’s postwar prosperity remain--and provide the city with advantages that similarly depressed industrial cities cannot claim. It has educational institutions in or near the city (the University of Michigan, Wayne State) and medical institutions (in part, a legacy of all those union health care plans) that are innovative powerhouses and that currently generate private-sector activity in biomedicine, information technology, and health care management. And there is already a smattering of examples of old industrial outposts that have reacquired relevance. An old GM plant in Wixom has been retrofitted to produce advanced batteries. There’s a new automotive-design lab based in Ann Arbor."
This is just to say that the public infrastructure and productive forces in Detroit, dilapidated though they are, are nonetheless developed to a relatively high degree given the city's past. The biggest problem is that this productive capacity lies misused or unused entirely.
So, what Detroit needs is a massive influx of public funds. Some will say: but how could we afford this? I think this is a short-sighted objection. We can afford to drop bombs, kill people and destroy infrastructure in the Middle East and elsewhere, but somehow we're supposed to believe that we can't rebuild things and help people here at home? This isn't even to speak of the fact that our society still produces enough of a surplus to fund both the imperialist adventures and a far more ambitious domestic spending agenda (that's just to say how large the surplus is, not that we shouldn't want to end the wars). The surplus exists, but it's use is presently dictated by the constraints of profitability. A just society, in contrast, would mobilize the surplus to assuage suffering and cultivate human flourishing.
Perhaps the biggest problem facing Detroit is indifference. This has both racist as well as capitalist overtones (to the extent that we can disentangle the two). The racist dimension lies in a tendency for whites to gawk at black misery in such a way that poor blacks become dangerous, dark "others". This was, of course, true even during the "golden years" of Detroit when the auto industry was booming. But this deep indifference has increased with the rapid decline of the city. This tendency undermines bonds of solidarity between whites and black people, since many whites tend to see black misery as "their problem" and not a social problem of wide significance to all. The result is that black people aren't seen as fellow comrades, fellow citizens whose plight is of interest to everyone. So when a city as heavily black (over 81%) as Detroit is in deep trouble many whites see it as a problem that doesn't concern them. This was true in post-Katrina New Orleans as well as in many other cases. There is a profound lack of solidarity here: the suffering of the black population of Detroit is not internalized and identified with enough by whites. What's needed is a Left politics grounded in uncompromising solidarity.
The capitalist dimension is similarly dehumanizing. Capitalist investment is blind to human needs as such. It only aims to maximize profit. So human suffering that cannot be exploited profitably simply doesn't register. The system doesn't take note of it- and capital is not invested to assuage it. As far as the "Free Market" is concerned, Detroit is invisible. It doesn't matter how talented or deserving residents are- capital investment is not an ethically sound process in which the deserving get their just deserts. It is thoroughly impersonal, and has no regard for human development. This is reification at work- the tendency to see ensembles of social relations and even human beings as mere exchangeable objects to be exploited when its profitable or cast aside when its not. This is what Adorno called "bourgeois coldness". Clearly it is to blame if we're to understand why the people of Detroit have been allowed to undergo such steady decline and misery for the past 40 years.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
From the Archives: Detroit and Bourgeois Coldness
Sunday, January 2, 2011
From the Archives: Why Cars Suck
From 2008:
Apropos of George F. Will's moronic column extolling as virtues the ravages cars cause to our social landscape and planet, I thought I'd point out that he clearly didn't read my post on why cars suck:
In no particular order, here is an elaboration of why cars suck:
1. Cars magnify the worst aspects of capitalist social relations by alienating drivers from lived interaction with fellow human beings. Cut off from immediate contact with others, and enclosed in a climate-controlled, steel/glass bubble, many drivers behave as though the world outside them is at best decoration, at worst a series of conspiring inconveniences plotting to sabotage their delusional mission to proceed unhampered by anything. Drivers treat other people in ways that they would never treat them if they were walking next to them on the street.
2. Following closely on the heels of #1: cars are selfish. It's all "me, me, me" with cars. Cars, in effect, habituate and encourage this kind of behavior. Moreover, the entire idea of a "personal automobile" is selfish in that it hogs up resources, space, etc. in a way that is unsustainable and unrealistic. For example, moving down a major thoroughfare in a city, a car with one passenger takes up roughly 1/4 of the space of a city bus (which can hold up to 100 or more people), uses a disproportionate share of fuel resources, and on top of that exacerbates the problems of congestion. Cars also crowd streets that would otherwise be excellent bike routes. Although it's hard to see from the point of view of the drivers seat, the reality is that city-life is a profound testament to the sense in which everyone is bound up in relations of dependency. A city is a space in which lots of people cohabitate on terms that no individual sets themselves. Yet, the unrealistic point of view encouraged by the car is something like the following: "I am free to the extent that I can drive my care where I want when I want however fast I want and not have to live by train schedules or interact with other city dwellers." It is undeniable that this mindset has been produced after many years of having infrastructure devoted exclusively to car-travel, pitting drivers against each other in a free-for-all traffic jam they are stuck navigating through every day of their lives. So it stands to reason that car drivers aren't inherently bad people; on the contrary they can be educated and habituated into new habits if we were to change to a car-free system of infrastructure and transportation.
3. Cars make cities less safe. Especially if you are a biker or a pedestrian (God forbid, right?). Some drivers get so caught up in their own quest to quickly make an unprotected left turn at an intersection (or quickly sneak in front of pedestrians to make a right on red) that they simply forget that they are inside of a climate controlled, metal/glass bubble which moves at the touch of a button on the floor of the car cockpit. Meanwhile, the people they almost mow down or intimidate or whiz in front of are walking on their own two feet. Nonetheless, the distorted relation that drivers stand with respect to the outside world causes them to miss a lot of the facts, thus they tend to focus intensely on whether they might have to wait either 0.5 seconds or 5 seconds to turn left (as the case may be). In such a case, the person trying to walk down the street becomes the enemy. "Must turn before this jerk pedestrian makes me wait for 2 more seconds than I have to", we can imagine drivers thinking to themselves. This is barbaric.
4. Cars are (f)ugly. Sorry, but they are. Particularly in salty, snowy conditions where they are all covered with dirty crud. There are strong aesthetic grounds, it seems to me, to purge the heavy presence of cars from the urban landscape. Let them be garnish at most, rather than the main course. At the very least, I think we can all agree that the hideousness of parking lots (and everything they represent) is the perfect exemplification of this problem. The most beautiful urban spaces in our country were almost all constructed and planned before the manufactured obsession with the personal car became pervasive. If we're talking only aesthetics here, in the narrow sense of how 'attractive' or 'scenic' an urban space is, should we go in for the walkable leafy streets of Greenwich Village or the prosaic, washed-out, lifelessness of suburban areas designed for maximum car-commuter ease? Rather than going on the defensive and merely trying to impede the creation of new parking lots, we should instead push for the immediate expropriation of all parking lots in dense urban areas, in order that the public might re-develop the space for affordable housing, urban agricultural efforts and other worthwhile activities that counteract the social/environmental ravages of cars.
5. Cars pollute city air and water. Set aside their role in climate change for the moment. From a more local perspective, the heavy use of cars by individuals in cities creates unnecessary smog and air pollution that is something you can smell, taste and sense on days when its particularly bad. Why should we put up with this when just about everything else about cars sucks?
6. Cars are a serious misallocation of resources. This is true from the perspective of production as well as of consumption. In terms of consumption, cars are a terrible investment: they require maintenance and upkeep costs, insurance costs, financing/payment costs, repair costs (when things inevitably break), parking costs, fuel costs, ticket-costs (for when you inevitably park in the wrong spot or get caught going 5 over). Moreover, cars do not hold their value (which, btw, is totally untrue of bikes; quite the opposite in fact). So, cars also represent a misallocation in the sense that consumer resources could be put into something that yields a more worthwhile return for their cash. From the perspective of production, cars are not what our society should be building: cars are not necessary since there are tons of alternative, more efficient, more egalitarian, progressive, environmentally sustainable and practical ways for people to get around. Now it is a unfortunate fact of the infrastructural design of much of the USA that cars are in some sense all but required. But three things must be said here: first of all, buses and bikes are in many ways more of an option than people in these places realize. Surely there are options for reducing car-use even where people are forced to use cars as a primary means of transport. Second, the inability to avoid heavy car-use in a certain area should not be a reason to condone cars as such, but should instead be a reason to change and re-think the way that the particular space in question is physically set up. Third, this unfortunate fact about much of America is not true of major cities at all (one thinks of Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, DC, San Fran, etc.). In Chicago cars are not required at all; on the contrary they are more of a nuisance than a benefit even for convenience-minded, self-interested folks. To take a Chicago example, who can argue with 2 all-day all-night 24/7 rails (the 'blue line' and the 'red line') that let you stay out and play as long as you like on weekends without having to bother with designated drivers or pricey cab debacles? So with these three things in mind, bringing the conversation back to production, we should point out that manufacturing personal cars is a waste of labor power, capital and energy resources. They should never be built in the first place; there are, however, a lot of vehicles that society does need: A shit-ton more buses that we currently have, trucks and vans appropriate to certain tasks of building infrastructure, etc. One need not be anti-worker (or anti-UAW) just because they oppose the production of automobiles. Those workers have a ton of know-how about how to build all kinds of things we do in fact need, and a just society would hardly put them out of work simply because capitalists have been investing in the production of something we don't need.
7. Car horns and alarms are noise pollution.
8. As a friend of mine astutely points out in the comments, "cars make gyms make sense". There's a lot of wisdom packed into that short quip. Kind of reminds me of a guy I knew in college who would drive 0.25 miles from his apartment to the university gym to work out for two hours and then would drive back to his place. In the Spring, no less.
9. Oh yea... and have you ever heard of this thing called CLIMATE CHANGE? Either cars are on their way out or we're on our way out as a planet.
10. etc.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
David Harvey on the Crisis
In the not so distant past I was fortunate enough to see David Harvey give a talk on the global economic crisis. What follows is a summary of some of the key points he made.
Mainstream analysis of the crisis is totally inadequate on at least two fronts. First, it has no historical depth. It hardly even bothers to connect recent events with things that went on in the 1990s, let alone the 40-year global economic trend known as neoliberalism.
Second, there is no sensitivity to the geographical dimensions of the crisis. It's important to see where the crisis has been concentrated and where it has been felt most acutely. Globally, skyrocketing unemployment is most acute in the US. Compare this to China and Argentina, both of whose economies are still growing steadily. Though China has been growing, however, there are many signs of overproduction there. There's a question about whether the crisis will hit there next.
The center of the crisis has to do with the banking systems that were plugged into collateralized debt obligations in the US. Banking systems that were insulated from that dirty business have largely been able to weather the storm so far.
Importantly, capitalism doesn't solve it's crises, it moves them around geographically. For example, consider the East Asian Financial crisis in the late 90s. Loads of profits went to those who speculated on it- but the crisis, at the end of the day, was not solved. It was moved around geographically.
In Vol. 2 of Capital, Marx talks about the flow of capital in a "healthy" capitalist system. In his view, a "healthy" capitalist system is one which is growing via the exploitation of labor. Any blockage of capital flow, he notes, can cause crisis. Capitalism must, in order to function, constantly expand. If you're a capitalist, for example, you must reinvest constantly in order to remain a capitalist (i.e. in order to compete and stay afloat in the market).
When capitalism cannot expand it goes into crisis. This creates a deep problem for the system. As more and more capital is accumulated, more and more profitable investments need to be found to absorb all of this surplus. When there are not enough profitable investments to absorb this surplus, the system goes into crisis because the flow of capital, the expansion and growth necessary for capitalism, have ground to a halt.
It doesn't take a lot of reflection to see that this process cannot continue ad infinitum.
But the system isn't rational: it isn't self-aware and it does not "learn" from its mistakes or reconfigure itself to be sustainable. It is like a car driving towards a cliff with no one at the wheel. Thus, the pressures to expand and accumulate that drive investment and production create increasingly irrational processes. The huge turnover in consumer products created by "planned obsolescence" has been steadily increasing over the last 30 years- this is a desperate way to try to prop up profits (because if you sell someone a blender that lasts for 50 years, they won't need to buy another one for a long time).
Another "bellwether" here is Olympics opening ceremonies (probably the same is true of Super Bowl halftime shows). They get progressively more and more costly, spectacular over time. There is a push to make the NFL season longer and longer and it is well known that the Super Bowl itself is being pushed back further and further to allow even more TV build-up and ad dollars to accumulate.
Looking at the crisis in broad historical context requires, first of all, that we say something about the crisis of the 1970s. This seems to have dropped out of the popular discussion of economics and finance entirely, but it's important to compare and contrast our present situation with that of the early 70s.
The view from the top holds that the crisis of the 1970s was caused by the "excessive" power of organized labor. Labor was too powerful and was able to bargain too effectively. In other words, labor's power was getting in the way of profitability insofar as trade unions were able to win decent contracts with relatively high wages, good benefits, pensions, and all the rest of it. The power of labor and social movements meant that nation states were, relatively speaking, under pressure from below to meet some degree of human needs. Moreover, the relative power of the nation state in the global system meant that it was not easy to move capital around globally.
The big problem for the ruling classes in this situation was that they were being taxed too heavily and made to negotiate with labor on terms that were far too close (for the taste of the ruling class) to equality. Mind you it was not anything like "dual power" between labor and capital- but even this modestly equitable arrangement was not to the liking of capital once a global recession set in and profits were down across the board. Something had to give.
One strategy was to loosen up immigration. This was passed in the US in the 60s in order to try to undercut the bargaining power of organized labor thus driving down wages. It didn't work. Thus the ruling class pushed for the "liberation" of the financial institutions so that they could more easily move capital all over the globe. This enabled off-shoring and outsourcing so that capital could get access to the global "reserve army" of labor. This enabled it to avoid dealing with the social power of labor in the advanced capitalist nations.
But ruling class praxis was not entirely indirect. The late 70s and early 80s were a time of intense attack from above on the power of labor. Thatcher and Reagan were elected to break the back of labor and they largely succeeded in doing so.
All of the above factors lead to a stagnation of the living standards for working people, which had been steadily on the rise during the period from 1945-1973. The gap between what labor was earning and what it could purchase (because prices continued to rise) began to be covered by credit cards and other forms of debt from the early 80s onward.
It was true, from a ruling class perspective, that the power of labor was "too strong" in the early 70s in order to keep profits rolling in. But nobody could really say that labor is the problem this time around. In fact, labor has been so thoroughly beaten back by the last 40 years of neoliberalism, it would be laughable to try to blame this crisis on the excessive power of labor. As everyone seems vaguely aware, the present crisis was caused entirely by the reckless speculation of financial elites.
What is the story with the bailouts? Bailouts are not a new concept. When, for example, Mexico was threatening to declare bankruptcy, this scared the shit out of New York financial institutions. They were scared because if Mexico really did go bankrupt, they would have been fucked because of all the money they had tied up there in investments. Thus, the ruling class pushed for the US to bail out Mexico. They pushed for the bailout so that they didn't lose out on their investments.
Let's be clear: the bailout wasn't administered for the protection of the well-being of the Mexican people. On the contrary, it was purely a move aimed at protecting the investments of New York financial institutions. Thus, the bailout came with conditions: it would be administered only if the Mexican government promised to implement punishing austerity measures, so that the investors can make their $ back as quickly as possible.
This happened in various different ways, all over the globe. The process came to be known as "structural adjustment". The IMF would give massive loans to cash-strapped developing countries on the condition that they consent to structural adjustment (i.e. austerity).
That is more or less what the US is undergoing right now. We are undergoing structural adjustment. The ruling class is using the power of the state to create a "good business climate", i.e. a situation in which corporate taxes are low, toxic assets are moved from private to public rolls, interest rates are near zero, labor is docile, etc.
Why is this happening? Because this whole rotten system only works when it is making handsome profits for capitalist investors. It only works when capitalism is growing and expanding. And given that it is clear that the State is not an enemy, but an enabler of profit accumulation, we shouldn't be surprised that everything the State is doing right now has to do with attempting to jump start the process of profit accumulation again. If that means punishing ordinary people, cutting living standards, wages, and jobs for the masses.... so be it. The State isn't set up to meet human needs- it's basic function is to create the conditions for profit accumulation, what the bourgeois press calls "growth". So when the contradictions are laying out in the open for all to see- we shouldn't in the first instance find fault with the State itself, but with the whole rotten system of which the state is but one element.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
More on Obama's Austerity Commission
(via SW.org):
When Obama created the commission in early 2010, he mandated it to consider various options "designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015," including "changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the federal government."Read the rest here.
Translated into everyday language, this meant two things: One, that closing the deficit would depend on some combination of increased revenues and lower government spending on many activities; and two, that Obama himself was putting a big bull's eye on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
To make sure that the commission produced the kind of result that official Washington was looking for, Obama used his six appointments to put two well-known budget "hawks," Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, in charge as commission co-chairs. Obama also tapped two business executives, as well as Alice Rivlin, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration. With the game already rigged, Obama then tossed a bone to organized labor with the appointment of former Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern.
When Andy Stern is the only "progressive" representative of labor on the commission... that's not a good sign. Jan Schakowsky released an "alternative plan" recently which, on the face of it, says all of the right things (e.g. "deficit reduction isn't an end in itself", we should tax the rich, etc.). The trouble with this alternative plan is that nobody else on the commission gives a shit. 11 of the 14 members of the committee, including the "liberal" Dick Durbin, voted for the doomsday ultra-conservative plan last week. If 11 of them are OK voting to kick the majority of us in the teeth while lavishing the rich with further tax breaks, it's not likely that they would even bother to read Schakowsky's proposal.
Like Kucinich in the presidential elections, Schakowsky is a token who is only there to assuage the frustrations of disgruntled liberals who still support the Democrats. She has no real power on the committee, and that was part of the plan from the start. The fact is that Obama loaded the commission up with business elites (as if they should have any say whatsoever!) and right-wingers from both parties...then he sprinkled one faux-progressive (Stern) and one lone liberal.
Contrary to the apolitical way it is described in the media, deficit hawking is not some technocratic matter of finding creative or "smart" ways to solve a hard math problem. Deficit hawking is one-sided class warfare from above, and both the Republicans and Democrats are on board with it. This entire panel wants to do what governments in Ireland, the UK, Greece and France have tried to do recently: push through punishing cuts that force ordinary people to pay for a crisis that was caused by financiers and capitalists. When push comes to shove, we in effect see the true owners of economy; we see who really has power and what the priorities of governments really are. Perhaps that's what the (bipartisan!) ruling-class technocrats that chair the panel meant by "moment of truth".
We shouldn't sugar-coat what's going on. Austerity is the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. That is what this commission is there to do, and their proposal makes doesn't hide this. They want to slash and burn Social Security and Medicare while, at the same time, giving the rich massive gifts in tax reduction. Now if there are still some apologists for the Dems who would say that we should support the panel, they can at least be clear about what they'd like us to support: one-sided class warfare from above. My sense, however, is that such a blunt portrayal wouldn't win many folks to the cause.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
"Wallstreet Regains its Swagger"
Watch here. Whew, I must confess that I was worried about whether their swagger was being threatened. I guess I can stop staying up at night now, assured that Obama's embrace of the Paulson Plan did what it set out to do.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
"Our Founding Fathers"
(I read about the following in Ahmed Shawki's Black Liberation and Socialism):
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both expressed misgivings (and sometimes rhetorical opposition) to the institution of slavery. There was even some disagreement about the issue of slavery among the US ruling class in the 1790s.
But despite the personal misgivings either Madison or Jefferson may or may not have had, their rationale for upholding slavery as a national economic institution could not be clearer. As Jefferson saw it, the "cost" of abolishing slavery was much higher than whatever "benefits" it might provide for the ruling class. He writes: "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation on the other".
James Madison, likewise, declared that slavery was a "moral, political and economical evil". But Madison didn't stop there, he quickly followed up with qualifications. Despite this evil, he argued, "there could be much improvement" in slave culture, "particularly where slaves are held in small numbers by good masters and managers". More importantly, he added, the "costs" outweighed the "benefits" for the ruling class.
If there were no slaves, Madison asked, "will you [i.e. members of the ruling class] cultivate the land yourself? Then beware of the difficulty of procuring faithful and complying laborers. Will you dispose of its leases? Ask those who have made the experiment what sort of tenants are to be found where an ownership of the soil is so attainable".
Note the dispassionate, cold, calculating character of the arguments. They acknowledge that the enslavement of human beings is morally repugnant... but their final arguments have nothing whatsoever to do with human beings. Their resting argument could be expressed in quantitative terms, with numbers and equations. Concern for human beings as such doesn't enter into their calculations at all.
The Jefferson/Madisonian reasoning seems to be this. "We" (i.e. the ruling class) would like to maintain our ruling status. In order to do this, we need to find a way to best invest our present holdings such that we can get steady, maximally large returns. "Procuring faithful and complying laborers" is difficult to do. Hence we should maintain the institution of slavery in order to secure a steady source of profits and power.
This instrumentalizing, objectifying way of thinking about human beings characteristic of industrial capitalism (what Lukacs and others came to call "reification"), was what Martin Luther King, Jr. was picking up when he said:
When I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are tied together...A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them, make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments... and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say "America, you must be born again!".
Friday, May 22, 2009
Why cars suck REDUX
Apropos of George F. Will's moronic column extolling as virtues the ravages cars cause to our social landscape and planet, I thought I'd point out that he clearly didn't read my post on why cars suck:
In no particular order, here is an elaboration of why cars suck:
1. Cars magnify the worst aspects of capitalist social relations by alienating drivers from lived interaction with fellow human beings. Cut off from immediate contact with others, and enclosed in a climate-controlled, steel/glass bubble, many drivers behave as though the world outside them is at best decoration, at worst a series of conspiring inconveniences plotting to sabotage their delusional mission to proceed unhampered by anything. Drivers treat other people in ways that they would never treat them if they were walking next to them on the street.
2. Following closely on the heels of #1: cars are selfish. It's all "me, me, me" with cars. Cars, in effect, habituate and encourage this kind of behavior. Moreover, the entire idea of a "personal automobile" is selfish in that it hogs up resources, space, etc. in a way that is unsustainable and unrealistic. For example, moving down a major thoroughfare in a city, a car with one passenger takes up roughly 1/4 of the space of a city bus (which can hold up to 100 or more people), uses a disproportionate share of fuel resources, and on top of that exacerbates the problems of congestion. Cars also crowd streets that would otherwise be excellent bike routes. Although it's hard to see from the point of view of the drivers seat, the reality is that city-life is a profound testament to the sense in which everyone is bound up in relations of dependency. A city is a space in which lots of people cohabitate on terms that no individual sets themselves. Yet, the unrealistic point of view encouraged by the car is something like the following: "I am free to the extent that I can drive my care where I want when I want however fast I want and not have to live by train schedules or interact with other city dwellers." It is undeniable that this mindset has been produced after many years of having infrastructure devoted exclusively to car-travel, pitting drivers against each other in a free-for-all traffic jam they are stuck navigating through every day of their lives. So it stands to reason that car drivers aren't inherently bad people; on the contrary they can be educated and habituated into new habits if we were to change to a car-free system of infrastructure and transportation.
3. Cars make cities less safe. Especially if you are a biker or a pedestrian (God forbid, right?). Some drivers get so caught up in their own quest to quickly make an unprotected left turn at an intersection (or quickly sneak in front of pedestrians to make a right on red) that they simply forget that they are inside of a climate controlled, metal/glass bubble which moves at the touch of a button on the floor of the car cockpit. Meanwhile, the people they almost mow down or intimidate or whiz in front of are walking on their own two feet. Nonetheless, the distorted relation that drivers stand with respect to the outside world causes them to miss a lot of the facts, thus they tend to focus intensely on whether they might have to wait either 0.5 seconds or 5 seconds to turn left (as the case may be). In such a case, the person trying to walk down the street becomes the enemy. "Must turn before this jerk pedestrian makes me wait for 2 more seconds than I have to", we can imagine drivers thinking to themselves. This is barbaric.
4. Cars are (f)ugly. Sorry, but they are. Particularly in salty, snowy conditions where they are all covered with dirty crud. There are strong aesthetic grounds, it seems to me, to purge the heavy presence of cars from the urban landscape. Let them be garnish at most, rather than the main course. At the very least, I think we can all agree that the hideousness of parking lots (and everything they represent) is the perfect exemplification of this problem. The most beautiful urban spaces in our country were almost all constructed and planned before the manufactured obsession with the personal car became pervasive. If we're talking only aesthetics here, in the narrow sense of how 'attractive' or 'scenic' an urban space is, should we go in for the walkable leafy streets of Greenwich Village or the prosaic, washed-out, lifelessness of suburban areas designed for maximum car-commuter ease? Rather than going on the defensive and merely trying to impede the creation of new parking lots, we should instead push for the immediate expropriation of all parking lots in dense urban areas, in order that the public might re-develop the space for affordable housing, urban agricultural efforts and other worthwhile activities that counteract the social/environmental ravages of cars.
5. Cars pollute city air and water. Set aside their role in climate change for the moment. From a more local perspective, the heavy use of cars by individuals in cities creates unnecessary smog and air pollution that is something you can smell, taste and sense on days when its particularly bad. Why should we put up with this when just about everything else about cars sucks?
6. Cars are a serious misallocation of resources. This is true from the perspective of production as well as of consumption. In terms of consumption, cars are a terrible investment: they require maintenance and upkeep costs, insurance costs, financing/payment costs, repair costs (when things inevitably break), parking costs, fuel costs, ticket-costs (for when you inevitably park in the wrong spot or get caught going 5 over). Moreover, cars do not hold their value (which, btw, is totally untrue of bikes; quite the opposite in fact). So, cars also represent a misallocation in the sense that consumer resources could be put into something that yields a more worthwhile return for their cash. From the perspective of production, cars are not what our society should be building: cars are not necessary since there are tons of alternative, more efficient, more egalitarian, progressive, environmentally sustainable and practical ways for people to get around. Now it is a unfortunate fact of the infrastructural design of much of the USA that cars are in some sense all but required. But three things must be said here: first of all, buses and bikes are in many ways more of an option than people in these places realize. Surely there are options for reducing car-use even where people are forced to use cars as a primary means of transport. Second, the inability to avoid heavy car-use in a certain area should not be a reason to condone cars as such, but should instead be a reason to change and re-think the way that the particular space in question is physically set up. Third, this unfortunate fact about much of America is not true of major cities at all (one thinks of Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, DC, San Fran, etc.). In Chicago cars are not required at all; on the contrary they are more of a nuisance than a benefit even for convenience-minded, self-interested folks. To take a Chicago example, who can argue with 2 all-day all-night 24/7 rails (the 'blue line' and the 'red line') that let you stay out and play as long as you like on weekends without having to bother with designated drivers or pricey cab debacles? So with these three things in mind, bringing the conversation back to production, we should point out that manufacturing personal cars is a waste of labor power, capital and energy resources. They should never be built in the first place; there are, however, a lot of vehicles that society does need: A shit-ton more buses that we currently have, trucks and vans appropriate to certain tasks of building infrastructure, etc. One need not be anti-worker (or anti-UAW) just because they oppose the production of automobiles. Those workers have a ton of know-how about how to build all kinds of things we do in fact need, and a just society would hardly put them out of work simply because capitalists have been investing in the production of something we don't need.
7. Car horns and alarms are noise pollution.
8. As a friend of mine astutely points out in the comments, "cars make gyms make sense". There's a lot of wisdom packed into that short quip. Kind of reminds me of a guy I knew in college who would drive 0.25 miles from his apartment to the university gym to work out for two hours and then would drive back to his place. In the Spring, no less.
9. Oh yea... and have you ever heard of this thing called CLIMATE CHANGE? Either cars are on their way out or we're on our way out as a planet.
10. etc.
Friday, May 1, 2009
What the Democrats are really made of
Read about it here (via Huffington Post). I imagine that bankers are probably gorging themselves on caviar and champagne celebrating their victorious trouncing of a bill that would have helped people facing foreclosure. Its been a victorious last couple of months for them when dealing with the Federal Government. I expect they must be applauding themselves for having triumphed over all of those "losers", to use one financial analyst's take on people losing their homes. It's not like the banks are getting massive 'handouts', or anything. No sir, they believe in those good ol' merican values of "hard work", "honesty" and.... [substitute some other meaningless hackneyed cliche that has nothing to do with American capitalism].
PS: What the fuck is Jim Webb (D-VA) worried about? Not that it would be a justification anyway, but he isn't up for relection until 2012. When he ran in 2006 against racist bonehead George Allen, everything I heard from the 'liberal blogosphere' was about how populist and salt of the earth the guy was. What's his problem?
PPS: "Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) was wheeled into the chamber and pointed his finger in the air, signaling a yes vote, then dramatically swung it down, as if taunting the backers of the bill." Uh, when will this doddering old former-KKK finally do us all a favor and... retire?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Bernie Marcus on EFCA
(via Huffington Post). Here are some zingers, in case you missed them:
"If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to [former Sen.] Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs," Marcus declared.Also,
"As a shareholder, if I knew the CEO of the company wasn't doing anything on [EFCA]... I would sue the son of a bitch... I'm so angry at some of these CEOs, I can't even believe the stupidity that is involved here."But then, there's also:
"This bill may be one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life," he said, explaining that he could have been on "a 350-foot boat out in the Mediterranean," but felt it was more important to engage on this fight. "It is incredible to me that anybody could have the chutzpah to try and pass this bill in this election year, especially when we have an economy that is a disaster, a total absolute disaster."Preach it, Bernie. I wish you would air these statements for the ridiculously-named "Center for Union Facts" ads.
Then there's also the case of Citibank, who is using their $50 billion in TARP money to help combat the EFCA. Money well spent. It's like ransom tactics are an essential part of how big banks deal with society: Give me big $$ otherwise we'll sink the goddamn economy! Wait, now that we have the money, now we're going to screw workers and claim that if anyone tries to make unionization possible for the myriad workers who want it, then we'll... threaten to sink the economy and spend our TARP money combating the legislation! Another splendid case of this, of course, is that Fedex has claimed that if EFCA passes they will cancel a bunch of large orders from Boeing for more planes. Not because of anything financial, simply because they want to use their class power to threaten to send a torpedo into a crippled economy unless they get their way and keep unionization at bay. They don't even make a secret of it, they brazenly declare in the open that they will try to sabatoge the economy unless they get their way.
Where is the coverage of this in the big media outlets?
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
I know this much is true: Spandau Ballet as the "sound of Thatcherism"
From the Guardian:
Thatcherism was about more than politics. It was, obviously, also a cultural phenomenon that transformed British society. So while one can list any number of cultural trends from the 70s or 90s without linking them irrevocably to Ted Heath, Harold Wilson, John Major and Tony Blair, that's far harder to do with the cultural products of the 80s. City wide-boys; chrome-and-black-leather furniture; mobile phones the size of bricks; me-first attitudes: those are among the fruits of Thatcherism.I think this speaks for itself.
[...]
I loathed Spandau Ballet first time round; I loathe them equally now. More than any other musical assembly with the possible exception of Stock Aitken and Waterman, they are Thatcherism on vinyl.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Watch'em squerm.
From the Financial Times:
Pointing to Mr Obama’s tax hits, the US Chamber of Commerce on Friday described his budget as the “most redistributionist in modern American history”....Martin Regalia, chief economist at the CoC, said [of his organization's take on the Obama budget]:“I would prefer not to mention the views of our members, which contain too many expletives for a family newspaper.”I'm inclined to think that the amount of CoC expletives provoked by a piece of legislation is directly proportional to how socially-just the legislation is.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Peanuts and Profits
(Via Socialistworker.org) The recent salmonella outbreak caused by contaminated peanut products, it turns out, was "let loose" on the population in a naked attempt to keep profits flowing for the Peanut Corporation of America. The recent outbreak, which resulted in one of the largest food recalls in history, was responsible for 600 illnesses and 9 deaths across the US.
Stewart Parnell, the owner of the company, has a history of evading health inspections and knowingly sending contaminated food products out into the market. According to the socialistworker.org piece:
Parnell complained in e-mails that salmonella tests were costing him business, ordered a plant manager to ship products once identified as contaminated, and pleaded with health inspectors to let his employees "turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money."Other internal memos sent by Parnell complain that Salmonella testing and inspections are "costing the company huge $$$$". Apparently, Parnell discontinued relations with one inspecting company because they found "too many cases" of Salmonella. Other reports indicate that "inspectors found roaches, mold and a leaking roof" at the Blakely, GA plant now believed to be the source of the contaminations.
What's astonishing is that Parnell is not facing any legal ramifications for this. He didn't face any charges or fines the last 3 times his company was involved in contaminating food products (toxic mold in some cases, dangerous pesticides in others). In fact, he "was recommended to serve on the U.S. Agriculture Department's Peanut Standards Board." That's right.
Recently he has refused to testify in Congressional hearings about the outbreak, opting to take the Fifth. As of the 13th, his company has filed for Bankruptcy (chapter 7). It is unclear whether this will have an effect on the ability of civil lawsuits to extract compensation from the company for knowingly selling contaminated peanut products.
Meanwhile, foodbanks are throwing out tons of products containing peanut butter -at a time when foodbanks are becoming more crucial to enabling people facing hard times to eat. If this world was just, Parnell and his cronies would be forced to eat all of the food that these foodbanks are being forced to throw away while at the same time being required to compensate these foodbanks so that the necessary purchases can be made in order to replace their stock.
This whole situation is atrocious. This is a case of naked capitalist greed costing people their lives and maligning the heatlh of hurdreds more. Not to mention, this crisis will have calamitous effects for the (likely) thousands of workers employed by the company. At present, the company is liquidating all of its assets in order to pay off creditors, but is there any serious problem with the machinery and the production of peanut products such that the factory should no longer exist? The whole "everything is instrumental to producing profits" game is so wasteful: if there is machinery there that can be rehabbed and fixed, if there is a need for peanut products, if the workers there want to keep their jobs... why shut the factory down? Of course, the reason (within the explanatory logic of capitalist production) is clear... but it seems so ridiculous in many ways that a productive effort like this should just collapse, leaving creditors and investors taken care of while everyone else is shit out of luck.
Clearly, the answer must be that the 'free market' would have efficiently prohibited such events from happening, and Big Government has contaminated the mind of the heroic entrepreneur (Parnell) such that he acted against the imaginary hand of His Holiness Milton Friedman and consequently did bad things that simply betray the triumphant ethos of capitalism.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
'America's most miserable' magazine: Forbes is the winner!
Alright, so I'm quite aware I'm being baited on this one. Also, I understand that responding to anything in the magazine[sic] 'Forbes' is basically the equivalent of tee-ball when it comes to exposing it for the moronic, tight-wad bourgeois drivel that it is. Nonetheless I have to say something about their recent "10 most miserable cities in the US" list.
Chicago, according to this list is #3. Why? Well because Chicago is the capital of "lousy weather, long commutes, rising unemployment and the highest sales tax rate in the country".
Rising unemployment, last I checked, was a nation-wide (global, to be exact) trend that is increasing rapidly due to macroeconomic factors. Find me a large city that is not experiencing increasing unemployment. Read about NYC lately? I'm sure Boston, San Fran and LA are surging right now in terms of job creation.
Lousy weather. Alright, point taken. It's cold here. But its fucking cold in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and NYC as well. I hardly hear anyone say "I'm moving to Boston (or Philly, NYC, etc) just for the winter because its fucking beautiful up there this time of year!". The only place that has good weather in the winter is Florida and Southern California. Is this news to anyone? The summers are gorgeous in Chicago, and the fall and springs can be quite nice as well. But I guess I should move to a retirement home in a resort-town in FL so that I can enjoy the good weather and the tax shelter.
Which brings me to the next source of 'misery' in Chicago: the high sales tax. Yeah, its fucking high. It should be exchanged for a progressive city income tax (or better yet: federal funding allotted relative to federal tax revenue generated from the city, so that rich tax-evaders can't simply to try to move away from city taxes). But that's not what the idiots at Forbes would say: They give '#4 most miserable' Memphis 'extra points', for instance, because TN has no state income tax. Bwahaha. Didn't Forbes himself run for President as a Republican on a platform to scrap the federal income tax and replace it with a sales tax on the order of 28-35%? According to this moronic logic, Forbes should be rejoicing at the highly regressive city sales tax in Chicago and praising the city for having no income (or other, more progressive) tax. At least Chicago exempts food purchases from its exorbitant sales tax, which is not something I can say for other 'tax shelter' states like TN, for example, who hits their residents with a whopping 9.25% sales tax on all FOOD puchases. But TN gets 'extra points' from Forbes for having no state income tax. I'm sure the real beneficiaries of TN's lack of an income tax (the schmucks who live in the plantation-mansions in Bellemeade) really sweat paying an extra 9.25% on their food purchases.
Finally, Chicago is miserable because of 'long commutes'. This has got to be the worst complaint o this pathetic 'top ten' list. Long commutes for who, exactly? The morons who drive themselves from the loop to Glencoe (40 min north of city limits) every day? I thought we were talking about the CITY, not the stupid cookie-cutter suburbs surrounding it. Getting around town is extremely easy using trains and buses in Chicago, even if you are going from one end of the city to another. Also -if you are one of the douchebags that actually reads Forbes regularly, then likes are you have the cash to live virtually whereever you like, which means you could very well live quite close to your cushy place of employment. Where's the commute there?
The article also mentions that Chicago is trying to get the Olympics which, they suggest, might help improve transportation in the city. But that's rather vague, isn't it? I certainly hope the anti-tax zealots at Forbes aren't insinuating that the transportation infrastructure (which is all publicly owned) will improve with more funding (i.e. higher taxes). Also -which infrastructure are they talking about? Mass transit (rails, buses), the roads, the prevalence of bike-lanes, the interstates? They don't bother to say. That's because this isn't a serious article... its a largely a thinly-cloaked jab at the city "where one if its own just became the most powerful person in the world". It's almost as though Obama is the reason Chicago is so high on the list, and the rest of the 'knocks' against it are contrived to fit this end. Nonetheless, I dont want to suggest that anything about the criteria that Forbes uses is legitimate: its crude, suburbanite white conservative crap.
In fact, if we apply the criteria Forbes seems to rely upon consistently, it seems to me that the #1 most miserable city in America is clearly New York City. After all, unemployment is on the rise there, the city budget is in trouble, its not warm and tropical, commutes are 'long' and busy if you're trying to drive your Bentley from lower Manhattan to the Hamptons every day, the city has much higher taxes than Chicago, and its pro sports teams didn't win championships last season (the Giants just went 0-1 in the playoffs and the Yankees stunk).
But the only thing, however, that is really miserable here at all is this criteria used by Forbes to evaluate 'cities' (nevermind that they hardly discriminate between alpha world cities and small towns). According to their logic, the place to be right now (assuming you are an old, crusty, filthy rich straight white man) is some unincorporated tropical island that has no taxes whatsoever, nice beaches, no minorities (except for servants, of course) and is conducive to effortless drives from the country club to the beach mansion.
I guess things like the following are not relevant when evaluating a city:
-How walkable it is (fyi Chicago is the #4 most walkable in the US)
-How good the schools are (k-12, amount of Universities in area)
-Intellectual climate (public lectures, events, symposia, etc.)
-Culture (music, art, theater, film, museums, etc.)
-How cosmopolitan and diverse it is
-Architecture
-Natural beauty (umm... like natural bodies of water, for example)
-How Bike-friendly the city is
-Amount of space allotted for public parks
-Political climate
-Safety factor for non-heterosexuals
-Race relations
-Cost of living
-Comprehensiveness of public transit
-Food possibilities
-History
-Pollution factor
Etc, etc...
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Hard times
“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”
Somewhere in the distance I hear the faint sounds of the world's smallest violin...
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Why is the new art so hard to understand?
The above is the title of a marvelous short lecture delivered by Theodor Adorno in 1931 (published in English for the first time in 2001 in Richard Leppert's (ed.) huge collection of all of Adorno's writings on music). Its striking how much is packed into this short piece. It is also very refreshing to read someone as erudite (and also, not accidentally, very challenging to read) as Adorno trying to answer this seemingly straight-forward question before a very wide audience. What's interesting is that Adorno's talk is not ostensibly addressed to philosophers, theorists, academics or artists. Rather, he addresses the general public who is confronted by artworks. Think of the 'average' person wandering through a museum.
The first thing he does is delimit the scope of the talk to a specific sense of the question ('why is the new art so hard to understand?'). After all, what is "the new art' and what does he mean by 'hard to understand?'. Adorno has in mind art that is specifically modern in the "sense that it is accompanied by the shock of its strangeness and enigmatic form, the shock that is actually the basis of all the talk about its being hard to understand."
Whatever we might say about 13th and 14th century European painting, for example, the content and formal characteristics of such works are, more or less, readily intelligible to a modern Western audience. A straight-forward representational painting, or even better a painting trying to achieve perfect mimesis, would hardly strike the average viewer as shocking, strange, enigmatic or confusing.
We wouldn't expect any person on the street to say of a painting by Michelangelo or even Monet, for example, 'that's not art'. In contrast, it would not be difficult to imagine this same 'average' person on the street standing before a Pollock, or a Richter, or Rothko, Stella, etc. in a confused (or, perhaps indignant and resentful) fashion, perhaps even wondering whether there is anything of value about such works (if they are even to be considered 'art' in any meaningful sense at all). I'm reminded of numerous times when I stood before works of this sort in a state of confusion: what is this about? what is going on here?
In other words, "older art", as Adorno points out, "possesses a certain immediacy of effect that makes it understandable, while this immediacy is no longer present in the new art, and hence some kind of helping operations are required in order to penetrate its center."
For Adorno, this experience of difficulty derives from the fact that the production of art, artistic material, the demands and tasks that confront the artists as they work, etc. have all become divorced from consumption. That is, artistic production has been divorced from "the presumptions, claims and possibilities of comprehension that the reader, viewer or listener brings to the works of art." Another way to put this would be to point out that artistic production in modern capitalist society (in contrast to other eras in which artistic production was explicitly embedded in other life-activities), art is removed from all immediate use and thus from all immediate comprehensibility. After all, "art for art's sake" is not a call to make art conform to the demands of daily life activities (e.g. to force works of art, on pain of dismissal as 'useless', to have some immediate purpose such as getting stains out of clothing).
Hostility to 'modern' works of art (be they paintings, music, etc.) takes many forms, but one common reaction I've observed is the impulse to point to the past as an era (before things took a 'wrong turn') which must be recovered. I am reminded here of certain types of conservatory-student musicians, totally hostile to Webern or Berg, who might instead recommend a recovery of tonality or a return to the 'beautiful' music of earlier (Romantic, in particular) periods. Schoenberg's music is 'bad', for example, to the extent that "the chords, which are built in many layers and do not have a given function within a given key, cannot be repeated as arbitrarily as the old ones, or because the rhythms cannot be combined into regular, symmetrical forms".
Another way to characterize this attitude would be to posit the history of Western music as a continuous, internally coherent progression which made sense until the isolated aberration of artists associated with 'modernism'.
Adorno points out, however, that the relevant consideration here is not the psyche of modern artists (as deviant individuals, or as having orchestrated this 'wrong turn' into smug incomprehensibility), but rather the socio-economic situation of contemporary society itself. The difficult, challenging character of modern artworks, for Adorno, is "the result of a socio-economic development that transforms all goods into consumer goods, makes them abstractly exchangeable, and has therefore torn them asunder from the immediacy of use." In modern art's struggle to maintain its own autonomy from the demands of 9:00-5:00, from the banality of mass markets, it has generally endeavored to abjure the dictates of 'use' altogether. In earlier societies, art was bound up with ceremonial and religious functions; this is no longer the case in contemporary culture. Whereas most all consumer products (themselves a strange development: 'products made for the purpose of consumption') retain some inkling of use-value, art is purportedly exceptional precisely to the extent that denounces all considerations of 'use' in this sense.
Why is modern art alienated from use? Adorno rightly points out that to "describe how this alienation came about would be nothing less than to sketch the history of our society". But what is it about contemporary society, then, that accounts for this divestment from use and this struggle to preserve art's particularity? As suggested earlier, For Adorno it has to do with the separation of production from consumption. Production tends to behave in a way that expresses the tensions and contradictions of existing social relations prevailing in a certain society. Production, through being directly subjected to these forces often becomes the site of calls for change. Consumption, in contrast, tends to "lag behind in unchanging existence, because it does not posses the force of production, which would point beyond what is unchanging; socially consumption is merely produced without itself seriously helping to produce -and only mirrors relations whose primary need is to maintain themselves". In other words, the methods/trajectories/goals of producing tend to be a site of change more so than the tendencies of consumption. Consumption is in important respects more conservative and passive (think of someone sitting in front of a TV) whereas production tends to play a more active role in shaping/changing current consuming habits (think of the production of the TV shows in question). The interaction between the two, however, is not a one-way street. Without getting into too much detail here, the relationship is dialectical (they mutually interact with each other and causation does not proceed linearly from production to consumption). Nonetheless, 'dialectical relationship' does not mean that production and consumption are equally efficacious with respect to the other. Moreover, we must not only consider the dialectical interplay between production and consumption, but also the internal dialectic between different modes of production throughout history (i.e. the ways in which certain productive activities are influenced by/reactions to/caused by earlier productive activities).
I've taken this discussion astray a bit, so let me try to bring it back to Adorno's point about the separation of consumption and production and its consequences for art. In impressionist art, or the music of Wagner, for example, the "lines between consumption and production had not yet been cut... but were merely wired in a more complicated way... in Wagner the preexisting schema of a harmony, which always grows out of a tension and resolution, did not emerge from the work itself but was still carried by social tradition." The shock that accompanied cubism and futurism, in contrast, was qualitatively different from the "agitation over Wagner's supposedly wrong notes, or the supposed daubings of the Impressionists". The radical break between consumption and production as it regards modern art of the early 20th century, for example, was such that art no longer "had the task of representing a reality that is preexisting for everyone in common, but rather of revealing, in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to cover over in order to exist in safety; and that, in so doing, it repels reality". [my emphasis]
But must art be divorced from use? Why can't art continue to be embedded in the life-activities of contemporary society and take a form that is both useful and immediately comprehensible? The answer is that it can and in many cases it does; but what are the political stakes in doing so? The "really useful art, which serves the purpose of distraction -entertainment reading and kitsch prints, blockbuster films and hit dance tunes - is historically innocent and, despite all apparent timeliness of content, formally on a technical level this material is long out of date." Thus, even as certain cultural artifacts have an immediacy that seems to suggest how timely they are, they are 'historically innocent' in that they recycle old forms and endlessly re-issue slightly modified and repackaged forms as new and exciting. This repetition, banality, etc. is a feature of our current social/economic order. So,also, is this 'historical innocence' (a mode of repression, of forgetting) in which knowledge of the processes (read: political and economic struggles) by which 'we arrived at the present situation' is omitted.
Thus, rather than opting for complicity and unreflective (i.e. conservative) affirmation of the current state of society, progressive and avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th century have sought to resist the current order. Its another issue entirely how successful their strategies have been. But perhaps we could relate this question to the issue of the 'difficulty of the new art'. Consider the following objection. If art is so difficult, obscure, inaccessible, challenging and so on, that it is in many ways "secluded, off by itself", how could it play a politically progressive role if so few people can be affected by it? Adorno is worried about this problem and he notes that the "separation of art from reality endangers art itself... [this seclusion] threatens to become ideological -to be self-satisfied in a muffled, petit-bourgeois way, to forget its supportive human function, ultimately to become petrified into bad guildmanship." The danger here, in part, is that contemporary art could become all of the things that its philistine detractors love to say about it. But clearly this danger cannot be remedied by "arbitrary adaptation to the state of social consciousness... by reversion to older, outlived and outmoded way of proceeding" for in so doing art would sacrifice consciousness of itself, a sacrifice no critical art can afford to make. Moreover, we should not assume that the political solution to this problem can be solved by art alone, for it cannot. The economic/social conditions would themselves have to be changed as well; thus it is hardly a progressive position to simply chastise art for failing to 'reach out to all people as they are'. For the material, economic and political conditions would have to be different for such a widespread 'reaching out' to be a progressive move at all: it would require that the stark work/life (work versus leisure) divide of modern capitalism be abolished, that people "independent of privilege, be able to spend their leisure time occupied substantively and extensively with artistic matters." For things to be different, there would have to be an abolishment of the "demonically precise mechanism of advertising and anesthetization that -in every moment of people's leisure time- prevents them from occupying themselves with actual art".
Art alone cannot secure such a change in material conditions, but this is not to say that such conditions cannot be changed by any means. Recognizing the role that the social/economic structure of society plays in circumscribing the efficacy of art as political resistance requires also recognizing that many consumption-related 'needs' and desires are themselves the congealed effects of social/economic order on people's consciousness.
For Adorno, the argument that "the public wants kitsch" is dishonest. The need for "bad, illusory, deceptive things is generated by the all-powerful propaganda apparatus", to put the point in slightly overstated terms. In addition, the need for relaxation (instead of seeking out, during leisure time, cognitively challenging/demanding activities) is justifiable, but only because so many people are forced into "circumstances that absorb their strength and time in such a fashion that they are no longer capable of other things."
He ends the lecture with an imperative: "Let no one come back with a rejoinder about the slothful nature of human beings. For the suspicion is not so easily allayed that the consciousness of the person who responds in this way is more slothful than those on whose behalf he is responding."
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Class enemies getting richer, even as economy sinks...
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.Contrast that with this, for instance. Or, this. Or this. Or bullshit like this.
[...]
And the best part is that there are idiots who know all of the above but still have the nerve to write tripe like this.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
*sigh* Feministing...
Courtney Martin has a "Thank you Thursday" post exploring the "silver lining" of the recession. One of the plus-sides she has found is mostly offensive because it comes straight out of la-la land:
3. Thank you for the innumerable people who will be forced out of jobs that didn't fulfill them and inspired to creatively reinvent their lives so that, ultimately, they can be happier and contribute more to the world.Seriously? She knows of "innumerable" people who have been so blessed by this recession that they're now in a better job than they were before? A few other commenters and I pointed out that this suggestion might be a little insensitive, and I also chastised her a bit for always acting like every little suggestion that she might be privileged or tactless is tainting the feminist harmony pool or something.
On the plus side, her Not Oprah's Book Club book of the day, which is about Oprah's role as a neoliberalist, sounds fascinating. I guess it can be kind of a crap shoot trying to find worthwhile stuff over there lately.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Why cars suck.
The immediate impulse to write this post issues from the mind-numbing disturbance caused by some asshole's car alarm on my street, (its been going off steadily for 3 whole minutes now).
In no particular order, here is an elaboration of why cars suck:
1. Cars magnify the worst aspects of capitalist social relations and streamline the alienation of driver from actual, lived interaction with fellow human beings. Cut off from immediate contact and enclosed in a climate-controlled, steel/glass bubble... many drivers behave as though the world outside them is at best decoration, at worst a series of conspiring inconveniences plotting to sabotage their delusional mission to proceed unhampered by anything. Drivers treat other people in ways that they would never treat them were they walking next to them on the street.
2. In a closely related fashion: cars are selfish. It's all "me, me, me" with cars. Moving down a major thoroughfare in a massive city, a car with one passenger takes up roughly 1/4 of the space of a city bus, some disproportionate fraction of the fuel resources compared to their bus-riding counterparts, and on top of that adds to congestion which impedes the ability of buses to travel more smoothly and quickly. They also crowd streets that would otherwise be excellent bike routes. The reality is that city-life is a profound testament to the sense in which everyone is bound up in relations of dependency and made to cohabit a space on terms that no individual sets themselves. Yet, the logic of city-dwelling frequent car drivers seems to try to ignore (or even abjure) this reality in favor of a narrow individualism: I am free to the extent that I can drive my care where I want when I want however fast I want and not have to live by train schedules or interact with other city dwellers. This notion of heroic individualistic escape from social imperatives is a Romantic fantasy at best, pathological at worst.
3. Cars make cities less safe. Especially if you are biker or a pedestrian (god forbid). Some drivers get so caught up in their own quest to quickly make an unprotected left turn at an intersection, quickly sneak in front of pedestrians to make a right on red, etc. that they simply forget that they are inside a climate controlled, metal/glass bubble which moves at the touch of a button on the floor of the car cockpit. Meanwhile, the people they almost mow down or intimidate or whiz in front of are walking on their own two feet in conditions which are usually cold, icy, windy, etc. Or if you're biking hard, you're expending a great deal of energy. Nonetheless, the distorted relation that drivers stand with respect to the outside world enables them to take for granted all of these facts, thus they tend to focus intensely on whether they might have to wait 0.5 seconds or 7 seconds to turn left (as the case may be). The person trying to walk down the street is therefore the enemy. Must get home quickly, must get to Grocery Store, must get to TV, must get to work, must get... Its barbaric.
4. Cars are ugly. Sorry, but they are. Particularly in salty, snowy conditions where they are all covered with snowy/dirty crud. There are strong aesthetic grounds, it seems to me, to purge the heavy presence of cars from the urban landscape. At the very least, I think we can all agree that parking lots are the perfect exemplification of this thought, or at minimum, that parking lots are an atrocious eyesore in every instance. I advocate the immediate expropriation of all property holdings on which there are parking lots, in order that the public might re-develop the space for affordable housing, urban agricultural efforts and other activities that are the manifest opposite of parking lots.
5. Cars pollute city air and water. Set aside their role in climate change for the moment. From a more local perspective, the heavy use of cars by individuals in cities creates unnecessary smog and air pollution that is something you can smell, taste and sense on days when its particularly bad. Why should we put up with this when everything else about cars suck as well?
6. Cars are a misallocation of resources. This is true from the perspective of production as well as of consumption. In terms of consumption, cars are a terrible investment: they require maintence and upkeep costs, insurance costs, financing/payment costs, repair costs (when things inevitably break), parking costs, fuel costs, ticket-costs (for when you inevitably park in the wrong spot or get caught going 5 over). Moreover, cars do not hold their value. They are not necessary in the broad sense that there are tons of conveivable, more egalitarian, progressive, environmentally sustainable and practical ways for people to get around. Yet, it is a unfortunate fact of the infrastructural design of much of the USA that cars are in some sense all but required. But this is not so in a major city like Chicago. Cars are not necessary, anything but. So, this is a misallocation in the sense that consumer resources could be put into something more worthwhile. From the stand point of production, personal cars are a waste of labor power, capital and energy resources. They should never be built in the first place; there are, however, a lot of vehicles that society does need: A shit-ton more buses that we currently have, trucks and vans appropriate to certain tasks of building infrastructure, etc.
7. Car horns and alarms are noise pollution.
8. As a friend of mine points out in the comments, "cars make gyms make sense".
9. etc.
