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.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
From the Archives: Why Cars Suck
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.
Seymour on the "fear of democracy"
DEMOCRACY IS supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to.Read the rest at SW.org.
In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express.
Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure--by the threat of disruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. To the extent that the parliamentary system is ever really democratic, it is parasitic on a much more fundamental popular democracy.
Frances Fox Piven (along with her late partner Richard Cloward) has long argued that the electoral-representative system is most democratic when the working class and the poor are deliberately disruptive--when they are organized, but not institutionalized.
On Blaming the Victims
Bill Fletcher Jr. is getting really good at it. His new schtick is basically just that: don't criticize Obama and the Democrats... criticize the Left for "not working hard enough". As he put it in his piece on "enthusiasm" during the 2010 midterm campaigns:
Unfortunately, the main problem rests neither with the Obama administration nor the Democrats in Congress. It rests with the failure of the social forces that elected them to keep the pressure on. Too many of us expected results without continuous demand.Now, in a sense he's absolutely right. It was a mistake in 2008 to think that Obama would implement progressive reforms absent pressure from the Left. Moreover, it continues to be a mistake to think that we'll win even modest reforms without a left-wing social movement capable of making demands on the system.
But Fletcher's position is a contradictory one. Coupled with this emphasis on social movements and protest (and, sometimes, on "independent formations") is an injunction to submit to the Democrats. I say "submit" because I think that most accurately captures the relationship Fletcher encourages us to take vis-a-vis the Democrats. That is, he wants progressives and leftists to enter the Democrat apparatus, such as it is, and accept all its constraints and limitations without argument. Only then can we begin to agitate. Hence, he makes suggestions like the following:
A number of people, in the midst of justified outrage, have suggested that there needs to be a candidate or candidates to run in the Democratic primaries against President Obama as a way of challenging him. While I understand this view, I think that it does not work as good, progressive political strategy. Progressives are in a position of weakness. It is unlikely that a good, multi-racial, progressive challenge - that has credibility - can be mounted against Obama. I might be wrong. But what is the case is that progressives can mount Congressional challenges and, in that sense, mirror some of what the Tea Party has done on the political Right. I am talking about going after both the Republicans but also the right-wing of the Democratic Party.Again, the message is that we must work within the Democrat apparatus. But his advice that we try to steer the Democrats leftward by playing their game is not sound. Several points need to be made here.
First, he's wrong about the Tea Party. Though the media has massively overblown and exaggerated their importance and strength, they are not a serious source of power in contemporary American politics. They are more spectacle than substance. And, though this wasn't well understood in the media following the midterms, the "Tea Party" did not do particularly well in the elections. For all the spectacle surrounding nuts like O'Donnell, few of those kinds of wackos actually won elections. The "movement", to the extent that there is one, is bankrolled by billionaires and run by such "grass-roots activists" as Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich. Though the denizens of the Tea Party talk endlessly about being "anti-Washington", they are, in fact, mere tools of the Republican Party. They have no serious power over the GOP itself, but they do help to turn out the party's "base" to try to oust Democrats. This is the most interesting part about Fletcher's interest in this "model": he doesn't seem to grasp that the Tea Baggers are, politics notwithstanding, more or less analogous to PDA, except that the latter receive much less media coverage. That is, both the Tea Baggers and PDA are impotent organizations that are full of sound and fury but which, at the end of the day, signify nothing in the way of serious pull. They are willingly subordinate to one or other of the two major corporate parties.
Second, I don't understand how Fletcher can seriously believe that challenging the Democrats in Congressional primaries is a reasonable way forward. First of all, it is quite difficult to even mount such a challenge: it requires a lot of money and effort, often in the face of better-funded and well-connected candidates. Also, working within the Democrat apparatus means playing by their rules and accepting some of their political terms of debate. Given that progressive organizations have scarce resources, throwing money at primary challenges seems an unwise expenditure (better to spend it on alternative media, grass-roots organizing, movements, etc). For even if a "progressive" Democrat wins the primary, there's still the question of the general election where, in order to receive funds from the DNC, the candidate may have to make further compromises. But say that a progressive Democrat like Schakowsky wins a primary challenge and gets elected. What should we expect to change in Washington? The Prog Caucus is a completely marginalized force in the Party and it is well-known that they cave-in on everything that matters. They are under the thumb of the leadership and have little pull. And, as is well-known, in exchange for the pull they do get they make further and further compromises. The career of Paul Wellstone is a nice case study here.
At the end of the day, the ProgCaucus is a safety valve for the Dems. Their subjective intentions aside, their objective function is to keep progressives from leaving the Democrats by occasionally bubbling up with leftish rhetoric. I'm not convinced we need more of these folks. We need a qualitative alternative.
Third, I don't understand all of the emphasis on elections when Fletcher's whole schtick is that we need to build the movements to pressure elected officials. He spends a lot of time talking about electoral strategizing, the need to hold one's nose and support conservative Democrats, etc. He has a lot to say about what we shouldn't do (support third party candidates, criticize Obama and the DNC, etc.). But what has Fletcher done to build the movements? How do his suggestions help us understand how to build an independent Left?
The Fletcher of the last few months seems more like a critic of the Left than a comrade in struggle. He seems more likely to blame progressives and leftists than to blame those in power. That is a shame. Because he wants to fight for many of the right causes (against the wars, for taxing the rich, and so forth). But he's suggesting that we throw our resources and political energies into a black hole. The Democrats take and take, but they give nothing in return. We need a real alternative, and that means getting outside of the two-party straightjacket. Movements don't emerge out of thin air- they grow out of organizing work and conditions that require struggle. But organizing work doesn't pay for itself- if Fletcher would urge progressives, trade unions, and activist organizations to put all of their resources into building the movements and getting out critical media... the "weak" state of the Left that Fletcher loves to criticize might actually grow stronger. I'm not convinced that a strong Left is possible within either of the two pro-Business parties we have. The Democrats siphon off political energy and defuse it. We need movements that sustain and build the confidence of the Left, and that can only be accomplished outside the ephemeral swells of the televised, corporate election spectacle.
Wall Street Records Record Revenues 2009-10
The five largest U.S. firms by investment-banking and trading revenue -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley -- will likely have a better fourth quarter than the previous two periods, driven by equity underwriting and higher volume in stock and bond trading, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Even if this quarter only matches the third, the banks’ revenue will top that of any year except 2009.
The surge has come after the five banks took a combined $135 billion from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and borrowed billions more from the Federal Reserve’s emergency-lending facilities in late 2008 and early 2009 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Since then, the firms have benefited from low interest rates and the Fed’s purchases of fixed-income securities.
Read the rest here.
Can somebody please get these people some big tax breaks right away? I'm deeply worried about their well-being. It's not enough that they received gargantuan sums of public money through TARP. It's not enough that they're breaking records with the highest profits ever. So it's clear that they're desperately in need of huge tax breaks.
Good thing Obama and the Democrats are here to help them out. I'm sure the Dems will brag about having done so when they're running for re-election in 2012. This will surely make them more "competitive" in vying for corporate funds once campaigns get rolling.
Monday, December 13, 2010
"Told ya so" is not a rallying cry
See here. I hope none of those quoted here are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. I agree wholeheartedly with the basic politics of the letter, and I'm all for organizing the Left to confront and oppose the Democrats. But "I told ya so" is no way to win over new recruits.
It doesn't make sense: you don't begin by creating a wedge between yourself and those you're trying to win over to progressive politics. You begin by staking your arguments commitments people already have, but which cannot be fulfilled by the means they presently endorse (i.e. giving resources and public support to the Democrats). It is a strength of the letter itself that it does precisely this: it documents the right-wing tilt of the Democrat's two years of crushing majorities in Washington. But this "what we were saying" page misses the mark, as does the "who we are" page.
You don't start a conversation with on-the-fence Obama supporters by telling them what dupes they are. You don't win them over with "told ya so" bragging.
You win them by showing them how the causes to which they're already committed (e.g. ending the wars, fighting for single-payer, taxing the rich, etc.) cannot be won without a left-wing movement independent of the Democrats. You win them by showing them, concretely, how the Democrats have opposed and thwarted progressive initiatives. You win them by talking about the history of struggle and how past gains were really won.
This "what we were saying" page reeks of "told ya so" bragging. The quoted parties should save it for a cocktail party. Organizing isn't about tooting your own horn- it's about working with commitments people already have and convincing them that such commitments are part of a bigger struggle for freedom and justice.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we, on the Left, need to play nice with the likes of Tom Hayden and Thomas Frank. They should be held accountable for what they said and did. What I'm talking about here is what's at stake in writing this whole letter in the first place: winning progressive minded people to the idea that their political convictions don't register in the two-party system.
