Socialists are egalitarians. They put heavy emphasis on the value of equality. But what exactly does that mean? It means that socialists oppose social relations that are exploitative and oppressive. It means that socialists aim to bring about conditions in which all people can interact on terms of equality and respect.
Being a socialist means being prepared to struggle against class domination, gendered hierarchies, racial subordination, the oppression of LGBT people, and so forth. Socialists aim to secure equal freedom for all persons by liberating them from the arbitrary will of an oppressor (whether it's a capitalist, a colonial administrator, a Stalinist bureaucrat, a racist police officer or an abusive, patriarchal head of a family).
This means that for socialists there is a presumption against social hierarchies. But, anarchists will complain, socialists do not believe in completely horizontal forms of organization when it comes to political activism. The classic anarchist complaint against socialists who organize themselves in a roughly "Leninist" or "democratic centralist" way is that socialists aren't radical enough in their assault on hierarchy since "democratic centralism" is itself hierarchical in certain respects. Some more resolutely "horizontal" alternative, usually consensus-based decision making, is then typically held up as a more egalitarian and democratic way of organizing.
But is this objection sound? I don't think so. I think it is motivated by values that I share, but it fails to make crucial distinctions that any plausible theory of liberation must make.
As Elizabeth Anderson has argued, egalitarians, and socialists in particular, are hostile to at least three types of social hierarchy: (1) hierarchies of standing, (2) hierarchies of esteem, and (3) hierarchies of command.
(1) Hierarchies of standing are those in which oppressors are entitled to make claims on the oppressed, "to enjoy rights and privileges, while those below are denied rights or granted an inferior set of rights and privileges, and denied voice to make claims on their own, or given an inferior forum in which to make their claims." (2) Hierarchies of esteem are those in which those at the top "command honor and admiration, while those below are stigmatized and held in contempt, as objects of ridicule, loathing or disgust". (3) Hierarchies of command obtain when those at the "top issue orders to those below, who must defer and obey."
But this is not the whole story. As Anderson points out, whereas it seems reasonable to absolutely oppose hierarchies of standing, the same is not true of the other two types of hierarchy. After all, it doesn't seem inherently unjust to hold different persons in different degrees of esteem. We tend to think that there are cases in which some persons are praiseworthy and deserving of high esteem, whereas others are not. Some people are rightly worthy of contempt and loathing.
Moreover, though socialists believe in equality, would not say that all participants in a bicycle race are equally entitled to win the gold medal. So we need a further distinction here. What socialists really oppose is not hierarchy of esteem as such, but unjust hierarchies of esteem. That is, socialists oppose hierarchies of esteem based on race, class or property ownership, birth right, caste, etc.
Hierarchies of command are tricky as well, and getting clear on them is particularly relevant for adjudicating between socialists and anarchists on the question of organization. Where socialists and anarchists can agree is that there should always be a presumption against social hierarchy. That is, hierarchies are never self-justifying, are always prima facie suspicious, and we should want to have as little of them as possible. But whereas some anarchists would draw the problematic conclusion that no hierarchy is ever justified, socialists would again draw an intuitive distinction between just and unjust hierarchies.
What exactly is suspicious about hierarchies of command? According to Anderson,"to be subject to another's command threatens one's interests, as those in command are liable to serve themselves at the expense of their subordinates. It threatens subordinates' autonomy, their standing as self-governing individuals. Without substantial controls on the content of legitimate commands, subjection can also be degrading and humiliating. Even when superiors permit subordinates wide scope for acting, the latter may still live at the mercy of the former. Such a condition of subjection to the arbitrary wills of others is objectionable in itself, and has further objectionable consequences: timidity and self-censorship in the presence of superiors -or worse, groveling and self-abasement".
I think Anderson is right on target here, and I think anarchists would agree. But, and I'm with Anderson on this point, she doesn't think that all hierarchies of command are unjust. It depends on the function of the command:"Where commands regarding a particular action are not needed to coordinate conduct among different persons, egalitarians hold that adults should be free to make decisions for themselves, without having to ask anyone else's permission... But the solution of letting each choose for herself, however, cannot be generalized to the case where commands are needed to coordinate conduct among different persons. Anarchists hoped that it could be generalized. They hoped that effective coordination would arise from the spontaneous mutual aid of independent persons (Kropotkin 1906). Anarchy, however, has not proven to be a reliable arrangement for securing stable, peaceful cooperation on terms of equality among large numbers of people... some command relations are needed to secure cooperation."
In Anderson's view, and, I think, in the view of genuine socialists, the solution is that "when commands cannot be eliminated, the idea is to ensure that command relations are reciprocal, with everyone participating in making the rules that govern" such relations. That is, when commands are functionally required in order to coordinate actions, such command relations should be determined democratically. Those in a position to issue certain sorts of commands must be democratically elected by all and recallable at any moment. Also, what Anderson calls the "person/office distinction" must be respected. That is, command relations only mean that "subordinates owe obedience to their superiors in virtue of relations of office (as documented, say, in an organizational chart) rather than in virtue of obligations of personal loyalty to named superiors. Individuals thus enjoy powers of command only in virtue of their office... when a superior acts outside the color of her office, she has no authority over subordinates...off-duty in civil society, superiors and employees meet as formal equals...". Also, command relations should be granted only on the basis of merit, not because of nepotism or cronyism. Such positions cannot ever be "for sale". Finally, the command powers granted to such an office must never be unlimited. They must be constrained by a publicly agreed upon and democratically sanctioned set of rules (e.g. a constitution or platform).
For example, consider the sorts of relations necessary to run an effective rapid transit system in a major city. We would need certain hierarchies undoubtedly, but it's not as though the mere fact that you occupy a certain office in the transit system entitles you to boss people around in the grocery store or in a public park. No, your command powers would only be legitimate within a certain specific institutional setting, and even then such powers would be circumscribed by rules of various kinds.
Importantly, we must be able to prove that need for certain command relations is strictly speaking necessary. But are any such relations really necessary? I think it's rather difficult to answer this question in the negative. I'm with David Harvey, for example, in being uneasy about the prospect of power plants being run by consensus-based anarchist communes. Moreover, I'm with Anderson in thinking that the production of the sizable social surplus we need to have a just society requires the coordination of many wills by means of some limited hierarchies of command (e.g. some division of labor and coordination within, say, a factory would be necessary even in a worker-controlled and governed system). The existence of some such relations will be necessary in any large, complex society in which the productive forces are highly developed. After all, "the infeasibility of large-scale, fully-participatory democracy led Rousseau to insist that republics remain very small... but this restriction comes at grave costs".
One of those costs, I would argue, is that going small in all cases means squandering some of the potential of highly developed productive forces to eradicate all sorts of need and poverty. Socialists are thoroughly modern: we do not aim to turn the clock back to pre-agricultural societies. We want to use the high development of the productive forces to create a sustainable system that meets human needs, rather than a destructive, wasteful system that subordinates human beings and the natural environment to the iron laws of profit accumulation. All sorts of poverty and suffering are not objectively necessary in the way in which they were in, say, the Bronze Age. The technological advances we've made since then create the possibility of eradicating all poverty and want if put in the service of the public good, rather than private greed. Moreover, the high development of productive forces in modern societies has made possible all sorts of cultural production and creative expression that would not otherwise have been possible.
So where does this leave the question of political organization and the debate between anarchists and socialists? It should be clear by now that the inflexible anarchist prohibition on all hierarchies is implausible. The question, given that some hierarchies are necessary, is which hierarchies are just and which are unjust. To be sure, it might be difficult to know whether specific hierarchies are necessary or not. The only way to know is to experiment and see. Thankfully, history provides radicals with some evidence here about what works and what doesn't.
For socialists, the question of whether some hierarchies are needed must always be answered contextually. Sometimes consensus-based decision making is the best way to go. Sometimes, for instance when a strike is about to be called, consensus-based decision making is not appropriate. Similarly, in the context of a very small, local struggle, perhaps the best form of organization is one in which there are no institutionalized offices or hierarchies of command. But when you talk about putting together a national, or even international, struggle against exploitation and oppression, you need ways of coordinating action that are quite different from those required in smaller struggles. In order to be effective against a highly organized and potentially brutal ruling class, socialists must be organized and able to coordinate widely and generalize from local struggles.
In advanced capitalist societies, electing leadership and dividing up labor and roles is essential. The only question is how best to do it, and what constraints need to be in place to prevent abuses, unnecessary bureaucratization, ossification, and all the rest of it. Here, I'm inclined to think that the best way of combating these problems is to keep leadership fluid and to cultivate leadership capacities in everyone. In the context of a political organization, this means giving newer and less experienced members opportunities to lead so that they can develop the skills and experience necessary to grow and develop. It also means opposing stable, inflexible divisions of labor that leave someone, or some group, perpetually in a subordinate or relatively powerless roles. The expectation must be that every single member in a socialist organization is a potential leader, and that expectation must followed through. Anything less is a disservice to the socialist tradition.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Equality, Hierarchy and Political Organization
Thursday, January 6, 2011
What would we lose?
House Republicans are already talking about repealing ObamaCare. Now, as any reader of this blog is well aware, I am a staunch advocate of single payer. So I ask you: if you really care about genuine health care reform, what do we stand to lose if ObamaCare is repealed?
What will we have lost if the Republicans have their way? Why should progressives be disturbed about the repeal of a bill that did more in the way of disorienting the Left than it did in fulfilling progressive ideals?
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Rick Wolff: Calling Time on Capitalism
Excerpt:
Like someone convicted of murdering his parents who demands leniency as an orphan, corporate America demands conservative government and austerity on the grounds of excessive budget deficits. Mainstream media and politicians take those corporate demands seriously, reminding us who controls whom.Read the rest here.
From the Archives: Feminism or Feminism(s)?
One more, from 2009. This argument is still relevant in light of the somewhat recent controversy in the feminist blogosphere regarding Jessica Valenti's refusal to speak on a panel with an anti-feminist right-winger. Enjoy!
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In the feminist blogosphere, I sometimes run across the following argument.
"There isn't one, monolithic feminism. There's always already feminism(s) and there are as many diverse feminism(s) as there are people. Feminism(s) mean different things to different people"
I find this kind of patronizing, for one. This line is always laid down as though it said something profound, but the fact of the matter is that it is a half-baked platitude. It's one thing to take note of the political dynamics of the disagreements and contestations coming from the margins, which were aimed at the (largely) white, liberal, middle-class, straight feminist projects that had come to present themselves as the only game in town. But it is quite another thing to propagate the facile conclusion that feminism really just means whatever individual persons want it to mean.
In fact, you can't really understand what those very contestations and interventions (e.g. from black feminists like Angela Davis and bell hooks, revolutionary lesbians like Monique Wittig, feminists writing the wake of colonialism, deconstructive feminists like Butler, etc.) were about unless you unequivocally reject the idea that feminism can mean whatever certain individuals want it to mean. For if it were true that feminism just is the plurality of existing views, norms, and relations of power regarding gender and sexuality, then there wouldn't be much point at all in contesting the way that mainstream feminists were paving over forms of oppression that didn't form a central part of their own experience. If "feminism" just means whatever individuals want it to mean willy-nilly, then the practice of criticizing white liberal feminism from the margins couldn't be intelligible.
That is to say, according to those who sing the timeless praises of "singularity" as such, difference as such, and pluralism as such, etc. it would appear that bell hooks, Monique Wittig, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and many others did something seriously wrong. How dare they, you might think, contest or launch political interventions aimed at dismantling certain mainstream feminist theories and practices, when they ought to have left well enough alone and let those myopically white and middle class straight feminists "express their individuality and difference"? How dare they tell those white, middle class feminists what to do! Uh oh, its the 'feminist police'!
This is, of course, preposterous. There is a world of difference between making the totally valid sociological observation on the one hand that there is widespread disagreement about what feminism is and should be committed to doing, and on the other, claiming that there is an endless plurality of things feminism can mean for different people. The latter only obscures the actual concrete political dynamics of what gets to count as feminism by whitewashing important disagreements as simply 'different expressions of plurality'. When Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble, I doubt very seriously (for more reasons than I can count) that she would have said that she was merely expressing her individuality and adding yet another brand of feminism to the endless shelf of pluralism. Her book caused such a stir because it was a trenchant critique of a certain way of thinking about feminist politics, it expressed disagreements and offered arguments aiming to undermine what others thought feminism entailed.
Notice also, that if the 'endless pluralism' story were right, there would be absolutely no way to identify cynical imposters who called themselves feminists disingenuously. For instance, imagine that Rush Limbaugh decided, without changing anything about himself whatsoever, to simply call himself a "feminist". (This is already happening with Sarah Palin, btw). Could anyone who grasps what the tradition of feminist politics means actually take him at face value? Could we really bear to label his political commitments as 'solidly radical feminist' just because he claims we should? The problem here, of course, is that the 'many feminism(s)'-'endless plurality' story would have no way to contest Limbaugh's claim. For if they were right, they'd have have no reason to want to contest Rush's claims at all. Think about it. He'd simply be expressing what feminism meant to him and proving their point that there really are only feminisms and a wide plurality of views. They'd have no grounds for understanding the politics of what is and is not feminism.
If feminism has to do with liberation from oppression, it cannot mean whatever individual people want it to mean. Meaning is never a matter of individual whim. Pretending that it is, however, is hardly a subversive move, but a thought-act wholly welcomed by contemporary consumer culture. This faux-individualist megalomania is encouraged by existing relations of power, and it is a powerful narrative running through ideological "arguments" about social mobility, debates about redistributive taxation, into the ways that people are encouraged to think of themselves in terms of the various consumer preferences they have, and so on. Buy, buy, buy! Consume, we're told. Give in to your consumerist fantasies and lust after immediately gratifying fixes! And shame on you if you stop to think about what this whole individualist, consumerist picture might amount to... that's to commit the sin of "telling others how to live their lives". "The personal is political" is a feminist slogan. "Everything is personal and nothing may be criticized" is not feminist or radical at all, this is the conservative message of contemporary capitalism. Banal also is this notion of 'if it feels good do it', 'live and let live', etc. These are not emancipatory anthems, but hackneyed advertisement jingles for the status quo.
But in reality, even superficial critical engagement with our culture and society quickly reveals that we are constantly told how to live our lives, how to think about our bodies, how to think about gender norms, how to dress, how to behave, etc. Feminism is a project aiming to uncover and ruthlessly submit these features of contemporary culture to critique (with a view to overturning them).
Feminism is an unremittingly critical political project. At its best it leaves no cultural, social or political phenomenon uncriticized. But pulling this 'just let women do what they want' line is dishonest. Should feminists condone what Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the Anita Bryants of the world say? Is Sarah Palin a feminist? Of course not. And we have a name for people who say otherwise: post-feminists.
Feminists who say "just let people believe what they already believe" are no feminists at all. Feminism is supposed to be about criticizing and challenging existing relations of power. It's supposed to be about shredding oppressive norms that have come to appear to many as 'natural'. Anything less is complicit with oppression.
From the Archives: Private Interests Masquerading as Universal
From 2009:
Imagine if the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had said the following about why they uncompromisingly opposed the EFCA ("the card check"):
"We the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, represent the interests of a small group of financial and business elites who own large capitalist enterprises. We care, first and foremost, that we are earning as much money as possible. Take note of the "we" in the last sentence, for if someone else were to reap the returns of the institutions we own and control, this would be unacceptable.If they had said this, most people likely would have said: "Shove it, you rich assholes."
Now it seems to us that if the EFCA passes Congress there is a very good chance that more workers will form unions, which means that we will have to cede some of our profits because unions will require that we pay better wages, benefits, pensions and so forth. Moreover, they will curtail our ability to most efficiently manipulate workers (e.g. arbitrarily terminate employees or downsize to maintain profit margins) in our quest to maximize our profits.
At the end of the day, we as extremely wealthy and powerful capitalists will lose measures of our wealth and power if this bill passes. Hence our uncompromising hatred for the bill."
So of course, they cannot simply assert their narrow interests as capitalists in making a public argument about policy. To be heard, they have to make up some story about how their interests are in fact not really their interests, per se, but universal interests. That is, generalizable interests that at least appear to have some relevance to the lives of the 99% majority of the population who aren't part of the ownership of a massive private corporation. Hence all of the endless drivel about 'secret ballots' and so on.
Now fast-forward to the "health care debate" that's ensuing over the so-called "public option".
Anyone familiar with the AMA's history, recalls that they pulled every stop out in the late 1940s and early 1960s when health care reform was on the table. That is, they went apeshit and started babbling about 'totalitarianism' and employed Ronald Reagan to do commercials claiming that Stalin was coming to eat America's babies. This is what they said about Harry Truman's post-WWII plan to institute single-payer:
"all forms of security, compulsory security, even against old age and unemployment, represent a beginning invasion by the state into the personal life of the individual, represent a taking away of individual responsibility, a weakening of national caliber, a definite step toward either communism or totalitarianism"Who is the AMA? They are a large, influential political organization who represents the interests of the most powerful, wealthy and politically-connected doctors in America. They do not represent all doctors. See, for example Physicians for a National Health Program, who see the interests of the private insurance industry as fundamentally opposed to the role doctors ought to serve in a just society. They are staunch supporters of Single-Payer.
Now its not hard to see what the AMA wants. This organization, as the representatives of the most powerful and wealthy doctors, exists primarily to defend the power and high earnings of those whom it represents. So, its not difficult to take them seriously when they come out and say that they don't like paying Medicare rates (they can exploit markets to get even higher rates, so why should they settle for such lackluster earnings?).
But we would be making a seriously obtuse mistake if we thought that the AMA sincerely cared about things like:
-Whether our health-care system is well-ordered and just
-Whether profiteers run insurance institutions and routinely deny claims
-Whether everyone is getting the care they need
-Whether access is universal or guaranteed
-Whether everyone can afford healthcare
-etc.
We have no reason to think that they care for anything of these things in themselves. And, as Ezra Klein points out, we have very strong reasons to think that they would oppose any of these considerations if they conflicted with the material interests of wealthy and powerful doctors. The class dynamics underwriting their Association notwithstanding, the history of the AMA's political interventions speaks for itself.
So what role does the AMA play in public debates? Of course they can't make public interventions that lay bare their narrow, strategic interest in manipulating discourse so that they can maximize their earnings. So they have to say stuff like this:
“The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans.”Interestingly, they opened this statement by saying that care ought only to be "provided through private markets, as it is currently." Can anyone say 'dogmatic'? If they really cared about "the best way to expand health insurance coverage" why all the whining about the need to have "private markets" and "private insurers" front and center?
My, these business types are so big on the rhetoric of "choice". You can choose to be either insured by some moronic for-profit institution, or you can choose some other such firm of the same ilk. Or you can fucking wither and die. You pick!
To bring this post to a close, I want to tie this thought about narrow, stategic private interests into recent discussions of the 'power plays' being made in the debate over the "public option" bill in Congress. I sometimes hear, as on this Ezra Klein vs. Libertarian 'blogging heads' thing, that "the Democrats really want single payer, but..." or that "liberals really want SP but...". Nevermind the question of who these 'liberals' are and where one finds them. But if the Democrats, i.e. the party who has control of both chambers of Congress and the White House and has trounced the opposition party in the last two elections, want single-payer I find it hard to see what's stopping them.
But let's entertain the fantasy of liberal bloggers about how our government works for a moment. Let's say that the Democrats really do, deep down, get all warm and fuzzy when they think about single-payer. Why can't they just get it done? The answer can't be that the Republicans will oppose it. They already oppose the current reform. They opposed Obama in the last major election. They suck, that's why they keep getting hammered at the ballot box. So the answer can't be that the Democrats just don't have the votes.
What, then, is the holdup? Well it can't be, as Ezra Klein claims it is, that the problem is just that there is "status-quo bias" and "people don't want to lose the health insurance plan they have". That may be some small part of it. But this ignores the 50 million Americans without any insurance; surely they aren't biased towards the current situation. Moreover, this 'status quo bias' hypothesis contradicts Klein's frequently-made (and correct, in my view) point that "health insurance corporations are among the most hated institutions in America".
The pink elephant in the room here has got to be the entrenched, extremely profitable, powerful private health insurance industry who would cease to exist under a single-payer plan. The powerful class in charge of (and profiting from) these massive institutions are the biggest reason why reform would be so difficult to achieve. They aren't going to go down without a fight. They aren't ever going to play nice without being forced to. And we know they aren't going to put their eggs all in one electoral basket; they're going to hedge their bets. That's why the give millions to Democratic members of congress.
In short, we can't ever forget that these industrial giants uncompromisingly hate single payer, since they wouldn't be industrial giants any longer if the plan were adopted.
So why isn't this obvious fact ever discussed in the 'public debate'? Why is it so hard to believe that if the narrow interests of those who profit from the status-quo were nakedly asserted in the public sphere, most people would balk? Why not simply discuss, incessantly, the amount of money these assholes make a year? Why not place our moronic system in a global context and rank our performance against virtually every other major industrial capitalist country in the world (all of whom do not have profit-driven commodified insurance the way we do)? Why not ask why it is that people in those countries would NEVER accept the insecurity, uncertainty, and inhumanity of the sort of system we have?
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.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Straight Dope Chicago Responds
Read Cecil Adams's response to my post here.
I appreciate the response from Cecil. It is far more measured and charitable than my post was. Still, although I would be the first to admit that my initial post was a touch on the polemical side, I stand by what I said there. For example, I still disagree, as Cecil said in the original post that "The lesson many drew [from the "Time of Troubles" when Washington was mayor] is that meaningless elections = peace and prosperity, whereas democracy = bad". Perhaps the 25-30% who supported the Two Eddies crusade against Washington would endorse this claim. But I doubt that the majority of ordinary Chicagoans would.
That said, I felt partially vindicated after reading how much clarification there was in Cecil's response. I felt vindicated in the sense that the response largely argues that Cecil agrees with what I was saying (for the most part), whereas I'd construed him as disagreeing. I'm pleased to see that we're in agreement on more than I'd previously supposed, but I'm not convinced that we agree on everything.
Although this wasn't perhaps clear in my initial critique, part of the problem with Cecil's column on non-partisan elections had to do with what it didn't say. What I mean is this. If you didn't know the facts about Washington, race and politics in Chicago, you wouldn't walk away with a very accurate view after reading the column. Absent Cecil's recent clarifications and qualifications, the original column would leave you with the impression that Washington was a "problem" best avoided in the future. Compare and contrast Ira Glass's excellent piece on Harold Washington with Cecil's original column and tell me that the latter doesn't miss the mark.
Some of Cecil's points are well taken. I wouldn't want to argue that non-partisan elections are inherently racist. However, in certain contexts, when put to certain uses, they may absolutely be an instrument of perpetuating racial subordination. And in our case in Chicago, they are such an instrument. Using them cynically in order to prevent a non-Machine-sanctioned Black reformer from taking office again seems to fit the bill here. Cecil seems to agree with this much.
But Cecil's "second point" is that despite this unsavory history, non-partisan elections have their own merits as well. But what are these merits? This is where I get a bit confused.
In the original column, Cecil argued that the merit of non-partisan elections is that they force candidates to appeal across racial lines, whereas the older procedures didn't. I don't think this is true. To be sure, the old procedures had plenty of problems. But it isn't true that the old system didn't require candidates to appeal for support across color lines. The story of Harold Washington, as Cecil himself agrees, invalidates that worry. Furthermore, it isn't even obvious to me that "non partisan elections" encourage candidates to appeal across color lines. I don't see how eliminating primaries is a step in the right direction here, but I'm open to changing my mind. I do think that the non-partisan procedures were implemented to dilute the black vote, and I don't think they were ever drawn up to increase democracy. But I concede that the one-party Machine domination of Chicago politics may have been aided by the previous set-up (though it remains to be seen whether the new rules will have any effect on the health of the Machine... my own thought is that it will take a grass-roots struggle from below to really shake things up in Chicago).
One final thought about the idea of "appealing across racial lines". There is a reasonable sense of this idea and there is one that is problematic. The reasonable version is this. People of different races should be fully equal co-legislators, and should relate to one another on terms of respect. I myself endorse this rather abstract and idealized version.
But the problematic version is sneaky. It trades on the appeal of the idealized version above, while actually apologizing for already existing oppression. The problematic version basically interprets "appealing across racial lines" as "appealing to the prejudices and existing privilege of white people". In other words, "appealing across racial lines" means "appeasing those sitting atop the existing racial status-quo".
Thus asking white and black people to appeal to one another is not an identical request. Asking whites to appeal to black people means asking the historic oppressors to listen to, and take seriously, the needs and interests of the oppressed. Asking black people to avoid talking frankly about racism in order not to alienate mainstream whites is a different requirement entirely.
Of course, the most fundamental reason to combat and fight racism rests mostly on the "reasonable version" of the idea that I laid out above. You fight it because you care about the bigger struggle of fighting for an egalitarian society in which human beings encounter each other as equals in the fullest possible sense.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Seymour on Assange Allegations
Richard Seymour has an excellent post on the allegations against Assange here, which makes similar arguments to the claims I put forward here. Seymour's analysis is spot on. His criticisms of Wolf and Counterpunch are also fitting.
It has been infuriating to see so much muddled, basically sexist responses to the Assange allegations. To rule out a priori that Assange committed rape is ludicrous (and sexist). Rape happens all of the time, and most of the time the crime goes unpunished entirely. To defend the organization called wikileaks is one thing. To claim that you know beyond on the shadow of a doubt, simply because you support the organization wikileaks, that Assange couldn't have raped anyone is preposterous. Perhaps he didn't- I myself don't know. But I don't pretend to have a priori knowledge of his innocence. I also don't go around regurgitating falsehoods about laws in Sweden that define rape as "consensual sex with no condom". It's disgusting how many supposedly "Left" defenders of Assange have made these two blunders.
Of course, the US war machine could care less whether he did or not- they want to get him by any means necessary, for reasons completely unrelated to rape. Even if he did commit rape in Sweden, there is no real reason for extradition- yet we know that the US will try to capitalize on what happened in order to bury wikileaks.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
How our economy works
All societies, no matter when or where, must have a way of reproducing themselves over time. In order to do this, there must be some organized way of socially producing the things people in the society need to survive. This is the heart of any economic system: the way that production is socially structured and organized.
In the US we live in a capitalist society. Although people associate all sorts of things with capitalism (e.g. consumerism, greed, stock markets, etc.), we need not concern ourselves with all of these in order to really understand the basic structure of capitalism. As I said above, the heart of any economic system is production. We will therefore need to say something about how production is structured and organized in capitalism in order to get a grip on how the U Seconomy works.
In capitalism, production is for the profit of those who own and control production. The basic motive for all large-scale production is accumulation for accumulation's sake. But who is it that owns and controls production in capitalism? The answer is obvious: capitalists do. Production is owned and controlled by investors who possess all but one of the key ingredients necessary to produce (capital, equipment, raw materials, etc.). The only factor of production they don't own outright is labor-power, i.e. the capacity to work. In the not-so-distant past, of course, Slave owners did own this outright.
Now it doesn't much matter whether individual capitalists desire to produce for the sake of profit or not- they are forced to do so by competition (i.e. by the way the system is configured). If a particular firm doesn't reinvest profits in expanded production, often the result is that competition will push it out of business. In order to even be (and remain) a capitalist, then, one is forced to grow one's firm and accumulate rapidly. If you don't, you're liable to go under.
At the level of an individual firm, there is a great deal of conscious rational planning. All sorts of cost-cutting and allocative decisions are made in order to maximize the profits of the firm in question. But at the system-wide level, there is no plan at all: there is merely the anarchic head-butting of various firms who fight for market share and profits. The completely ludicrous idea pedaled by apologists for this system is that all of this irrational greed-driven competition will deliver the best possible consequences for all.
Any society needs to produce certain goods in order to reproduce itself over time. Just about all of the things we need to survive are dependent on the process of production in our society. (The idea that society could shut down tomorrow and we could all grow our own food in our back yard is a utopian fantasy).
Importantly, in order to be a capitalist society at all, production must not be under the control of the people. "Free enterprise" requires that the "entrepreneurs" have exclusive ownership and control of it. And worse still- what they do with their exclusive ownership and control is wield production exclusively to enrich themselves. Profit is the sole motive for investment and production.
Because of this, we can get the things we need (e.g. jobs, income, goods, food, etc.) from the system only if certain conditions obtain. That is, production only occurs when it can be done in such a way that capitalists turn a profit. When sufficiently high profits are not on offer, capitalists do not invest. This is the reason why "free market" health care systems leave the old and sick out in the cold: such persons are not "good investments" since they will need more than they will pay in. They are not potential sources of profit, so profit-seeking capitalists do not transact with them. The result is that their needs are liable to go completely unmet by the market.
Our entire economy, then, is like an engine that only runs when the ruling class is accumulating profits. This frames and circumscribes the space in which policy makers in the State make decisions. For Democrats as much as Republicans, the basic question is the same when it comes to sculpting economic policy: what can we do to create the conditions in which the accumulation process can resume? They are committed to using this particular engine, so their only real disagreements are over how best to fuel it.
All of the major economic policies implemented since the onset of the recession have been aimed at trying to solve this problem: they have all aimed at trying to secure the conditions for resuming profit accumulation for the capitalist class.
The stimulus bill, for instance, which was a Keynesian-inspired idea, aimed to solve this problem by trying to prop up effective demand. In other words, it was aimed at trying to increase the purchasing power of ordinary people so that they can go out and buy the things that capitalists sell, thus trying to solve the problem of overproduction and resuming capitalist economic activity.
Of course, the stimulus bill had side effects for ordinary people that truly were beneficial: increased spending on infrastructure, increased education spending, new jobs, protection of some old jobs, etc. But at the end of the day, these were just side-effects of the bill: the basic goal of the policy was to resume profit accumulation for the ruling class by propping up effective demand. If the basic goal was actually to help people in need for its own sake, this would beg the question of why so many needs (even the same needs addressed by the much-too-small stimulus) go entirely unmet by policy in general.
Or, take a few other examples. Take TARP. The goal there was simple. It had nothing to do with fairness, justice, or the best interests of the majority. It was rather obviously a massive transfer of toxic private assets from financial institutions to public rolls. The reason for it was simple: it was aimed at resuming the conditions of profitability as quickly as possible for the biggest and most powerful financial institutions which were teetering on the verge of collapse. You have to get that engine running again, right? If it was unfair or unsavory to ordinary people, that's because it had nothing whatsoever to do with what ordinary people should find fair or just. It had one basic goal and it succeeded marvelously. Everything else that was said about it was merely the massage-work of PR.
The same goes for "quantitative easing". The interest rates are near zero because the technocrats at the Fed think this is the best way restore profitability to the commanding heights of the economy.
Or, if you like, take the present regime of austerity. The reasoning behind this strategy is, as I recently noted, the same reasoning as the "structural adjustment" nightmares forced upon the populations of numerous countries in the global South and elsewhere. This is classic IMF-style neoliberalism. Massive sums of public money are mobilized to bail out financial institutions who've driven themselves into the ground- and in order to finance the bailout, a program of austerity for ordinary people is implemented. It's nothing personal- it's not as though the primary aim of the system is screw ordinary people, though this is often the practical consequence of how it functions. It's all about restoring the conditions in which the accumulation process can resume.
Now, it should be quite clear what I'm not saying by this point. I'm not claiming that there's some conspiratorial clique of elites who just want to screw us and do nothing but. No, the claim is quite the opposite: it doesn't much matter what bureaucrats and government officials think in a certain sense. As individuals, they can choose to operate within the logic of capitalism, or they can decide to resist it. But as occupants of a certain institutionalized role which is itself lodged within the logic of capitalism, they have no say. Even if they are leftish liberals who actually care about working people, so long as they are to work within the logic of capitalism they are forced, whether they like it or not, to care about the basic goal of profit accumulation. Because when the accumulation process stops, so does all of the cherished liberal programs that are funded by it. Thus liberals are stuck with a contradiction they can't erase so long as they operate within capitalism. All efforts, then, to try to massage away the worst effects of capitalism will be brushing against the grain and unstable over time.
Left-wing reformists have tried quite hard to try to deal effectively with this contradiction. Some have tried to nationalize certain sectors of the economy in order to bring some of the most crucial industries under democratic control. Some have tried to heavily tax and regulate capital; others have tried to hang their hat on strong trade unions who are, for a time at least, formidable enough to exact some compromises from capital. But at the end of the day, all of these putative solutions prove unstable over time for one reason: they leave the ruling class intact. As long as there is a ruling class, as long as the basic structure of the economy is under the control of capitalists, they will never be satisfied with concessions. They too can go on strike. They can (and have, in many different historical instances from the Paris Commune to Chile in 1973) appeal to foreign powers to intervene (directly/violently or economically). They can threaten capital flight. Sometimes they can just use the existing state apparatus to repress social movements demanding that the system change. They've got a whole goody-bag of tricks they will use if it their power is threatened.
For this reason, the basic analysis of capitalist societies provided by Marxism lends itself to revolutionary demands for justice. Surface level tweaks won't do. We need to change the basic priorities of the system and bring production under democratic control. Only the most radical form of democracy can succeed in bringing about such a state of affairs.
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.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Racist Bullshit in "Straight Dope Chicago"
From "Straight-Dope Chicago":
The idea of a nonpartisan mayoral election with a runoff if no one got a majority was first bruited in 1986, during the runup to the 1987 mayoral contest. The intent clearly was to avoid splitting the white vote again and letting Washington be re-elected. Richie Daley among quite a few others supported the plan, but an attempt to put it up for a city referendum failed...Straight dope my ass. Straight racist crap is more like it. Here's some bits from earlier in the article:
A 1988 effort to push nonpartisan elections through the state legislature died, but the idea came up again in 1995, when Republicans took control of the General Assembly and the governor's office for the first time in 25 years. They used the opportunity to push through a long list of cherished measures that had gone nowhere while the Democrats were in control, one of which was nonpartisan mayoral elections in Chicago.
...Pretty much everyone else was in favor, and how could they not be? David Axelrod, who had worked for both Washington and Daley, told the Tribune, "It forces you to appeal to a broader constituency than to one ethnic or racial group."
Hard to argue with. Governor Jim Edgar signed the measure into law, and it's what we're using now. Is it fair? Yeah, it's fair. The fact remains that had nonpartisan elections been the rule in 1983, Harold Washington wouldn't have been elected, and breaks like the one that enabled him to become mayor are precisely what the system is intended to prevent.
For many Chicagoans, [democracy] is a frightening prospect. Those who've been around for a while recall that the last seriously contested elections took place during that brief period in the 1980s when the mayor of Chicago wasn't named Daley. This is now widely thought of as the Time of Troubles. The lesson many drew is that meaningless elections = peace and prosperity, whereas democracy = bad...Before I rip this article apart, just ask yourself this: to whom is it written? Who does the author mean when he talks about "most Chicagoans"? Who is "a lot of people" in Chicago?
...However virtuous the system may look now, it wasn't put in place because of saintly considerations. Rather, it was meant to ensure that an electoral outcome a lot of people weren't too happy with never happens again.
The most famous mayoral election in Chicago history … well, I shouldn't say that; all the inter-Daley elections were pretty memorable. But certainly the one with the most dramatic consequences took place in 1983...
...white Chicagoans may not have been wild about the city's first woman mayor, but better her than the first black one.
[For a far more accurate account of the Harold Washington election in 1983 please listen ot the following excellent edition of This American Life on the subject here.]
Though the gloss given in "straight dope" suggests otherwise, the fact of the matter is that the way that most of white Chicago reacted to Harold Washington, who won the mayoral election fair-and-square (with far more grass-roots organizing and support than any Daley could ever hope to obtain), was absolutely outrageous and self-consciously racist. The way that the white-controlled City Council tried to thwart his reformist agenda was criminal and reprehensible.
But the tone of the straight-dope piece expresses none of this obviously unsavory truth. It adopts a tone of faux-objectivity that paves over the very real, disgusting attacks that Washington faced. It tacitly endorses the disgusting attacks by giving the voice of white outrage a veneer of credibility and universality. You'd hardly know from reading the article that white people make up only 1/3 of the population of Chicago- the article makes it sound as though "most", "many", "a lot of" Chicagoans are white, whereas a small fringe aren't.
Strangely, at one point the article complains that Harold Washington "split the white vote", but later on it defends the new (quite obviously racist) "non-partisan procedures" on the grounds that they force candidates to "appeal to more than one ethnic or racial group". This is flatly contradictory.
If Harold Washington indeed "split the white vote", then in what sense didn't he already have to "appeal to more than one racial group"? Moreover, if the "problem" for those wishing to maintain white political hegemony in Chicago was that Washington won by "splitting the white vote", in what sense were "non-partisan" procedures (which, if we believe Cecil Adams, are supposed to split the white vote) the "solution"? This is obfuscatory non-sense. On the one hand, the "straight dope" story is that Washington committed the sin of "splitting the white vote" and was, therefore, attacked by the Machine for having done so. On the other, we're told that the "solution" to the Harold Washington "problem" was the "non-partisan" mayoral procedure, which, we're told, has the virtue both of solving the Washington "problem" and forcing candidates to appeal to voters across racial divisions.
The fact is that the "power brokers" that the article seems to side with did not want there to be a Black mayor and they used every available means to try to thwart his plans and have him removed.
The article also suggests that most white Democrat Chicagoans voted for Washington, whereas some voted for the white Republican. In fact, 90% of white Democrats defected from their party to vote against Washington for the (white) Republican, whose campaign slogan was "Epton for Mayor: Before it's too late".
The bottom line is this. As I've noted elsewhere, the typical white racist line in Chicago is a Hobbesian one. Their paranoid, irrational view is that Chicago can either have (a) a chaotic, disastrous "rule of barbarians" if it allows full democracy, or (b) it can have an autocratic white ruler who "maintains order". Though some white apologists for the Machine may reproach Daley in certain respects, most consent to its top-down domination of politics insofar as it ensures the political subordination of the "barbarians", i.e. the people of color in Chicago who make up 2/3 of the population (1/3 Black, 1/3 Latin@). This is the politics of white paranoia playing itself out (listen to the This American Life episode for more details here.)
Despite the actual divisions, inequalities, and the demographics and history of Chicago, most of the mainstream white population in Chicago thinks it deserves permanent domination over the municipal and county government. Thus when a white candidate runs for Mayor, that's just "normal". But when a person of color runs it's "divisive" and "racially exclusive". As the "Straight Dope" article suggests, it's a "problem", it's "an outcome a lot of people weren't too happy with", which they want to make sure "never happens again".
This "analysis" of recent Chicago electoral politics seems rather nakedly racist. And it appears in affiliation with Chicago's so-called progressive publication no less. While The Reader is easily the best leftish news and analysis one can find in Chicago (certainly it's many, many light-years ahead of worthless tripe like the Trib or Sun-Times), I'm always bothered by how goddamn white (in the pejorative sense) the publication is. What I mean is that it is consciously written by and for a slice of the white population in Chicago but nonetheless understands itself to be a publication representative of the city writ large.
In reality, The Reader does not really express the needs or interests of people of color in Chicago. Indeed, even when it adopts a sympathetic attitude towards the other 2/3 of Chicago, it typically does so from an outsider, observer perspective, rather than from the perspective of fellow city-dwellers and comrades. It's not that I'm arguing that the Reader should focus exclusively on the topic of race and nothing else --but I think it's problematic how little it reflects the social or political interests of black Chicagoans. That can and should change.
Most of the time, there is not a lot of discussion of race in the Reader. So far as I'm aware, there is no regular input from a person of color in the paper about issues facing people of color. In a city so segregated that sociologists had to invent a new word to describe it ("hyper-segregation"), you'd think that the allegedly progressive publication in the city would be a bit more sensitive to the historic and ongoing subordination of black people in the city of Chicago. But apparently not. Hence you find ridiculous "maps" of Chicago among some of these folk which don't even bother to include much of the west-side or south-sides on the map of the city.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The apologetics roll in
See here.
The basic argument is that the ruling against the mandate is part of one "tradition" of views about U.S. economy, whereas the defense of the mandate represents another. The first "tradition" is laissez faire. The second is a reformist and progressive. The author of the article would have us believe that ObamaCare is part of the reformist tradition of ideas that lend support to Medicare and Social Security.
The facts suggest otherwise. ObamaCare is not a reformist push against the entrenched power of elites... it is a further entrenchment of the power of those very elites. Rather than tampering with capitalism, ObamaCare expands and institutionalizes the for-profit insurance industry and, at the same time, mandates that all Americans purchase their products or face a penalty. Medicare, on the other hand, is an ambitious program that actually displaced private interests for the public good by guaranteeing seniors access to health care.
So, it is just false that we must either defend the individual mandate put into law by ObamaCare, on the one hand, or concede defeat to the laissez faire lunatics on the Right. Putting the point that way obscures what's at stake by making Obama appear as a progressive facing down conservative opposition. In reality, he's basically a conservative defending a conservative idea against conservative opportunists that happen to be in a different faction of the single pro-business party which monopolizes the political process.
It hardly needs to be said that this notion of "two traditions of thought" is basically bullshit for at least two different reasons. First of all, from the perspective of pure intellectual history, these two "traditions" are neither perennially competing nor coherent paradigms unto themselves. The notion of "laissez faire" obscures more than it explains in the real world. It is mere ideology (in the pejorative sense). It is but one idea, marshaled in certain circumstances when others weren't so effective, used to legitimate certain unjust social arrangements. Capitalist economies have never really operated on the basis of "laissez faire", nor could they. Defenders of the inequalities of capitalism have been far more creative and dynamic than the facile idea of a "tradition of laissez faire" suggests. And the supposedly competing "progressive" paradigm is no better. Speaking purely in terms of ideas, views as different as the technocratic reformism of Keynesian economics, the agrarian radicalism of the populists, and the socialist egalitarianism of the early labor movement could all potentially be the referent of such a "paradigm". It is no help to subsume them all under one heading and claim that they were all after a "social minimum" or "safety net".
Second, it's unclear that we should think of the political struggles over reforms in purely ideational terms. We must also talk about material conditions, unexpected historical or economic shifts, organization and struggle, changes in configurations of power, etc. etc. In short, it won't do us any good to talk about the historical change a series of passages from one idea to the next. We forget at our own peril that the dominant ideas in a capitalist society are not the outcome of a free rational discussion open to all; they are often the congealed effects of a certain configuration of power. Marx's sociological way of putting the point is that the ideas of the ruling class are often the ruling ideas. That means that if you control the means of production and distribution of information, you're likely to have a strong impact on the currency of ideas.
Thus, the entire framework of analysis posited in this article is obfuscatory and ideological. Even worse, it misapplies it's own ideological framework and attempts to incorporate ObamaCare into a contrived paradigm to which ObamaCare does not belong.
Mandates, ObamaCare and Social Justice
A U.S. District Judge in Virginia, Henry E. Hudson, has recently ruled that the individual mandate in Obama's health care bill is unconstitutional. When I first read this, I was ambivalent. On the one hand, I've got no love for the Republican boneheads for whom this is a way of trying to assault the entire idea of health care reform. But on the other, I've long felt that the individual mandate is an oppressive, basically conservative idea.
No wonder, then, that the individual mandate was an idea hatched by the Right. As I've noted elsewhere, it emerged as an idea in the early 1970s from Richard Nixon as a response to Ted Kennedy's push for single-payer. As Ezra Klein notes:
The individual mandate began life as a Republican idea. Its earliest appearances in legislation were in the Republican alternatives to the Clinton health-care bill, where it was co-sponsored by such GOP stalwarts as Bob Dole, Orrin G. Hatch and Charles E. Grassley. Later on, it was the centerpiece of then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s health-reform plan in Massachusetts, and then it was included in the Wyden-Bennett bill, which many Republicans signed on to.So, before sympathizing with apologists for Obama and the Dems who will, no doubt, jump to the defense of ObamaCare against the recent ruling (by a conservative, Bush-appointed judge), it's important to understand what's at stake.It was only when the individual mandate appeared in President Obama’s legislation that it became so polarizing on the right. The political logic was clear enough: The individual mandate was the most unpopular piece of the bill (you might remember that Obama’s 2008 campaign plan omitted it, and he frequently attacked Hillary Clinton for endorsing it in her proposal). But as a policy choice, it might prove disastrous.
The individual mandate was created by conservatives who realized that it was the only way to get universal coverage into the private market. Otherwise, insurers turn away the sick, public anger rises, and, eventually, you get some kind of government-run, single-payer system, much as they did in Europe, and much as we have with Medicare.
The range of choices before us is not either (a) Republican non-sense, or (b) whatever Obama puts forward. No, on the contrary, justice itself recommends certain health care ideas and impugns others, regardless of what Obama does or says. Contrary to the beliefs of some of his apologists, he's not God and we're not theistic voluntarists.
Everyone who has spent any time considering the issue of health care can see that single-payer is the most rational and just arrangement. Why, then, should we shed a tear at the demise of a mandate that forces everyone to buy the for-profit health insurance industry's product? I agree with Ezra Klein that we shouldn't shed a tear, because this anti-mandate ruling could even turn out to be a blessing for those who actually believe in real health care reform:
If Republicans succeed in taking [the individual mandate] off the table, they may sign the death warrant for private insurers in America: Eventually, rising cost pressures will force more aggressive reforms than even Obama has proposed, and if conservative judges have made the private market unfixable by removing the most effective way to deal with adverse selection problems, the only alternative will be the very constitutional, but decidedly non-conservative, single-payer path.I'm tempted to say that conditions with or without the mandate will, in the long run, create pressures for more aggressive reforms. But the point is well-taken, the removal of the mandate erodes even the dubious idea that somehow the market could be made to provide "universal coverage".
This may be a setback for Obama, but it is not a setback for progressives who believe in real health care reform.
