Faking yourself as resistance (7 Jan 2011)

Fibreculture journal posted 10 theses about Web 2.0 by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter. I think the term Web 2.0 is starting to seem dated and inadequate to describe what they are talking about with these; something like network culture or social media might be more apropos. It was probably forced on them by the journal's theme, which illustrates the disconnect between how fast the internet changes and how fast scholars can organize to discuss the change.

The authors are primarily concerned with how social media diffuses social conflict: "Where is the enemy? Not on Facebook, where you can only have ‘friends’. " And: "The virus is the closest thing to conflict online." Instead of dispute and critique, there is sheer surfeit as a mode of dissent

They ask rhetorically, "How does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation?" and suggest that time spent with such media anesthetizes us; they haven't proved useful in organizing social movements. They have allowed the mere fact of participation masquerade as collective social action in the tallied wisdom of crowds. Lovink and Rossiter argue: "«Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence." In other words, simply participating in social media doesn't mean that one's voice is helping direct the "general intellect" that Marx writes about in the Grundrisse and has since become a key concept in theories (like Hardt and Negri's) about the revolutionary potential of the Multitude. Some see the rise of social media as confirmation of what Hardt and Negri prophesized, that the new sorts of subjects fostered by globalized capitalism inherently participate in some new kind of democratic association simply by virtue of their being, by instinct. This spontaneous collectivity is destined to overthrow capitalist Empire in favor of the expanded commons and peer-to-peer sharing and the end of profit and alienated work and all that sort of thing. Lovink and Rossiter are skeptical.

The authors also make the point that social media are simultaneously a form of consumption and a form of labor, so it makes no sense to talk about them as "free." We pay for them by consuming/using them -- that's their essential nature, their defining quality.

These days ‘free’ is just another word for service economies. The linux fiefdom know that all too well. We need to question naïve campaigns that merely promote ‘free culture’ without questioning the underlying parasitic economy and the ‘deprofessionalization’ of cultural work. Pervasive profiling is the cost of this opening to ‘free market values’. As users and prosumers we are limited by our capacity as data producers. Our tastes and preferences, our opinions and movements are the market price to pay.

The internet makes us feel entitled to voice our opinion about anything, as Paul Ford argues in this essay. Ford writes as though this is an innate human tendency, but arguably, the Web instills it in us, encouraging an irrepressible irritation to speak because of how frequently our opinion is solicited. What's important to remember is that inciting this irritation and giving it an impotent forum is a mode of control. The Web serves to vent off dissent, preoccupy our critical faculties on trifles when we are not caught up in the positivity of social networking. ("Hi friends! Let's share! Rainbows! Puppies!") Lovink and Rossiter's advice: "We need to promote peer-education that shifts the default culture of auto-formation to the nihilist pleasure of hacking the system... If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona."

Postcapitalist life (16 July 2010)

For all the complaining I do about the effects of consumer capitalism on everyday life and subjectivity and so on, I find it nearly impossible to imagine what a post-capitalist life would be like. Of course that is part of capitalist hegemony's achievement -- the so-called end of history. But it would help to be able to imagine what the goal is in order to pursue it in the fullness of good faith, instead of feeling like the future will hold just endless rounds of theorizing and complaining about the nature of what is and ever will be.

I continue to think what is going on in Berlin is pertinent to imagining alternatives, so this article by Sebastian Lütgert, a series of short passages about living in the city and about urban subcultural identity, was fascinating to me. He argues that "the impending collapse of a number of global systems and networks is going to thoroughly and lastingly stratify the ... post-capitalist subjectivities as we knew them, since hardly any of them have ever ceased to be middle class, however precarious their material existence may have become." That is to say, postcapitalism will not be a picnic for the vanguard agitators for it who have a middle-class habitus. That would pretty much include me (though I am not much of an agitator). He suggests that Western subjectivity is itself the bedrock of capitalism and would need to be discarded (how to do that?) to move beyond.

This section more or less expresses the dilemma:

After sixteen years in Berlin, I have no job, tax number, welfare benefits, pension plan, health insurance, credit card, savings, or functioning mailbox. Some of it happened by choice, some more by accident, and while it wouldn’t be too hard to lay out a postcapitalist politics in which most of these missing achievements would appear as the fortunate and desirable results of a set of precisely defined strategies, I’m still aware of the fact that whenever an item on the list becomes critical, it typically presents itself as the individual disaster that is capitalism, rather than the collective crisis that would get anyone beyond it. This may be due to the fact that most of the relations I maintain, and the networks I participate in, would have to be described as either “private” or “professional,” and not as “political,” however politicized this semi-public privacy or half-amateurish professionalism may appear to its respective protagonists. I’m relatively sure that this is a common problem, and that the root cause of most people’s existential panic when they reflect on their own biographies is that they have zero friends with whom they would have entered binding agreements to abolish the capitalist mode of production. Yet in a very practical sense, being relatively unattached to the state and its organs, while still being thrown cultural funding in varying quantities and irregular intervals, makes one surprisingly mobile. This can be dismissed as another essential requirement of our post-Fordist age, but comes, at least for holders of European passports, with the privilege of being offered some occasions to temporarily decenter one’s most general perception of things. The most hopeless aspect of European politics is the point of view (not the political orientation, but the perspective on the world) of its protagonists.

If I were on Twitter more, would I find the friends who want to "abolish the capitalist mode of production"? I wonder.

Consumerism and leveling (18 May 2010)

I don't often think of it this way, but my attitude toward consumerism was indelibly marked by my having grown up during the cold war, when the conflict between east and west was popularly depicted as a struggled between consumerism and a gray life of deprivation and standing in lines to secure soap and crusty bread. In the U.S., we were taught that people who had to stand in lines and who had no choices in department stores (let alone of department stores) were simply not free, in the most obvious and visceral of ways. As we were instructed to see them, the poor souls in communist countries were a featureless mass of lumpen people with no individual identity. They weren't allowed to express themselves, and the censorship extended beyond what they might have said or created -- with no consumer markets, no cornucopia of cultural products, what did they have to talk about anyway? -- to their very identity itself. Everyone was the same, and it was supposed to be awful.

Trapped in the angst of my teenage isolation, perpetually paranoid about both being sufficiently unique and included in the right cliques at the same time, that homogeneity didn't seem all that awful. I suffered from what seemed to me a kind of surfeit of identity, or at least a surfeit of potential identity. Every mundane choice about what I would wear or listen to or write on the front of my notebook seemed pregnant with obscure significance about who I was becoming, about what I was supposed to live up to, even though I desperately wanted not to care about any of it. I wanted to be in the endless eastern queue, waiting to be issued the standard package, my mind free to think about the things that mattered.

That was a conveniently rebellious attitude to have, anyway: Prosperity was a burden, and bourgeois conformity a crushing worry precisely because we weren't all issued Mao suits to wear. It was a relief to have the Iron Curtain countries out there as a fantasy alternative, as an anchor for resistance, even if at a deeper level, it represented an alternative no American kid in the 1980s in their right mind would have chosen when it came right down to it. Despite the optional paralysis, the hedonic treadmill, the invidious comparison, and all the rest of the vicissitudes of capitalism, I still wanted more stuff, not a one-way ticket to Leningrad. But still, it was comforting to have this concrete alternative to imagine, to think of an entire bloc establishing a limit to consumerism, promising that it was reversible, that people were still out there who were invested in the opposite ideal, that we shouldn't spend our lives competing to have better cars and clothes. One could imagine really existing egalitarianism and be allowed to regard consumerism as not merely the natural, inevitable way of life. One could imagine a time, or at least a place, where one could stop worrying about oneself.

Reading Slavenka Drakulić's early-1990s essay "A Communist Eye, or What I Saw in New York," about coming to Manhattan and encountering simultaneously the pressures of consumerism and the specific nature of western poverty, reminded me of my youthful fantasies, and to a degree, vindicated them. It turns out that people from the East actually did absorb an egalitarian ideal and were actually invested in a different way of life -- it wasn't merely a totalitarian state forcing them to surrender their innate wish to be better than their neighbors. QUOTE ABOUT COMMUNIST EYE. In the east, a repressive state channeled its people's ambition toward achieving freedom; in the west, already putatively free, our ambitions were turned subtly toward unfulfillable fantasies of self-aggrandizement in the name of sustaining endless economic growth. Prosperity replaces material deprivation with a psychic inadequacy that can't be meliorated.

In this n+1 essay about childhood in communist Czechoslovakia by Jana Prikryl are some hints that these differences in orientation may linger. She notes a UNICEF report that claims children fare better in the Czech Republic than in the U.S. because there's less comparative poverty, despite the U.S. being much richer in absolute terms. Prikryl explains that "the only economic advantage to being a child in the Czech Republic is that your peers are all about as poor as you are." Drakulić had noted something similar: "In socialism, we were not used to thinking of ourselves as poor," she writes. "The communist principle of uravnilovka (leveling) made us all live more or less under the same conditions. There were no ways, no means, not enough goods to establish a real, visible, palpable class distinction between poor and rich." In the U.S., virtually nothing is visible but such ways, means, and goods. Mastering through consumerism the constantly refining subtleties of the distinction between classes presents itself as the meaning of life.

Drakulić's essay vividly captures the way opulence and palpable inequality is oppressive in a different way than eastern grayness had been, an oppressiveness that in our own way we in the west were not permitted to admit. In our case, the proscription may have been more psychologically damaging because it was largely self-imposed, inculcated not directly by the State and by transparent propaganda but by what we voluntarily took in as entertainment, by what was directed at us from all sides by the existence of unnecessary goods we were invited to imagining possessing as our right. We conspired with the culture to make luxuries into necessities in our minds and to frankly enjoy the dubious pleasures of consumerism as though they didn't entail a sacrifice of an alternate ethical ideal.

In a passage about being dizzied by shopping at Bloomingdale's, Drakulić grasps much of what is unsettling and confrontational about consumerist ideology once it's made material and manifest in the commercial infrastructure -- invasive institutions of everyday life in the west that Americans cannot help but take for granted:

After a certain point, my eyes refuse to look, my mouth becomes dry, and I start to have a headache. I recognize this particular tiredness,... the feeling that it is just absurd to look at so many things and so many kinds of one thing, as if one is enclosed in a room with mirrored walls that endlessly reflect each other. It has to stop somewhere -- you think -- this multiplying, this plenitude doesn't make any sense. Coming from the world of shortages, one's idea of plenty is mainly of fruit, meat, vegetables, of shampoo, soap, or toilet paper. Here, you are murdered by variations on each of these and by the impossibility of distinguishing the differences. First you discover an immense greed, a kind of fever, a wish to buy everything -- the primordial hunger of consumerism. Then you discover powerlessness -- and the very essence of it, poverty. Moreover, you start to realize that Bloomingdale's for you is a museum, not a real store where you can buy real things for your real self.

And in that account of an afternoon's dislocation, Drakulić sums up an ideological education that Americans have drummed into them their entire lives. Americans learn that "real things" and "real selves" only exist as potentialities, though we are obligated to always pursue them.

Not that communism is a preferable alternative. Etc. The ongoing income inequality debate deals essentially with these alternatives of TK and TK, whether well-being is better promoted through leveling at the expense of economic growth, or whether growth enables general prosperity to obscure the misery of having less than some peers and the insecurity and intermittent guilt at having more than some others. The problem may be that some are better off under leveling, while others are better off with material prosperity, but no political system seems capable of embracing both possibilities, and so we alternate between them, leaving everyone worse off.

Reflections on revolution (26 March 2009)

In the past, I've occasionally adopted the stance of an armchair revolutionary and opined about how to subvert the state apparatus and destabilize the corporate hegemony and that sort of thing. If pressed about it then, I would probably have had in mind a vague notion that Gramscian organic intellectuals -- people I would relate to and endorse -- would somehow lead the charge, that the efficacious force for radical social change would evolve out of the antiglobalization movement that disrupted the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999. That was before I had even a rudimentary understanding of the financial system, and social change, in my mind, evinced itself only as a new virtuous life we all could be leading as individuals, not exploiting anyone with our consumerist purchases or any other manifestation of our destructive selfishness. Somehow everyone would be able to feel cool by doing the right thing -- which was more of an aesthetic matter than an ethical one -- and these virtuous new behaviors would never come to seem conformist or anything other than fulfilling and personally gratifying and expressive of our full uniqueness, etc., etc.

But unfortunately, that sort of personalized, self-contained revolution -- together with a few righteous protest marches here and there -- seems altogether irrelevant to the macro forces that shape the world's institutions and systems. Now I've become much more cynical, Burkean. I'm fearful that the "will of the people" becomes relevant only when it becomes a virulent populism, that the revolution will be led not by organic intellectuals who can articulate a plan of attack in the name of a righteous cause, but by demagogic opportunists who can tap into an atavistic rage among the masses, who can exploit their ignorance to achieve no goal other than the seizure of power for its own sake. The revolution often transpires as a series of chaotic, reactionary upheavals that no one can hope to control, regardless of their historical inevitability. In short, revolutions don't happen because smart people suddenly have more influence and scope to operate; they happen because the ignorant get riled up. This happens when it suddenly becomes impossible to ignore that their ignorance is being exploited by the "powerful."

As many have pointed out (though not so bluntly), that is what seems to be happening now in the wake of the serial bank bailouts. Well-informed critics have been saying for years that the real-estate bubble was unsustainable, that financial derivatives should be regulated, that leverage rations were too high, that ratings agencies faced conflicts of interest, that the quants' computer models were unreliable. But their complaints went unheeded; critics were marginalized further, and nothing changed. Now, after the fact, the same criticism is more likely to be raised in the tone Matt Taibbi adopts in this piece, which is well worth reading, even though the implications of its tone are scary. This sort of critique seems entirely righteous, and its deliberately inflammatory rhetoric is what seems to make it credible:

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

The degree to which we all feel somewhat powerless in the face of these monumental events warrants the contemptuous tone, which is proportionate to our impotence. In the run-up to the Iraq War, a similar impotence was felt, but generally only by those who could be ignored as pacifistic pansies from whom impotence was to be expected. The populace at large could enjoy a good war as a pep rally inspiring nationalistic pride. But there is no vicarious pride, no shock and awe to be found in the bank bailouts.

As this populist contempt builds, it worsens the conditions for doing business, the same conditions that bankers have already abused -- so it becomes a vicious spiral. Corruption seems like it may as well be the rule, from the top down to the little people. The tunneling Simon Johnson described becomes the rule for everyone -- the purpose of doing business is to loot, not to produce.

The furor over the AIG bonuses, et.al. has Felix Salmon wondering if class warfare has at last reached America.

In one corner are the technocrats not only in finance but also in government and the media: people who can understand the importance of distinguishing between a $250,000 base salary, a $2.5 million bonus, a $250 million bonus pool, a $2.5 billion bonus pool, a $250 billion bailout package, a $2.5 trillion monetary stimulus, and so on.
In the other corner are the real people, the angry people, the unemployed people -- and with them their elected representatives in Congress. They're not interested in such distinctions any more, they're not interested in what's fair or what's sensible. They saw their real wages stagnate for decades as the orgy of plutocratic self-congratulation reached obscene levels only to keep on growing. All they ever had was the American Dream: the idea that they, too, might one day become dynastically wealthy and join the overclass.
Now, of course, that dream is shattered.

Carson Gross, a guest poster at Basline Scenario, examines "the cultural costs of bailout nation" and reaches similar conclusions. "There may be technical solutions to the banking problem. However, if those solutions do enough damage to the cultural framework on which the system was based in the first place, even the most brilliant among them will be useless." The real problem, though, is that cultural framework may always have been inherently flawed, or as Marixsts argue, riven with unreconcilable contradictions.

What's frightening is that no one knows in precisely what form this incipient class warfare will erupt. Would anyone be shocked to see anti-Semitism spike over the next few months?

Update: This morning, the NYT tries to throw some cold water on populist fire with this sentimental letter from a former AIG trader.

The conserver society (13 May 2008)

Yesterday in the New York Times, Paul Krugman opined that oil prices are high not because of speculation but dwindling supply: "A realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil." He's not panicking about this, but seen in light of our looming problems with global warming, and reports of fertilizer shortages and the possibility we have maxed out our food production capacity, it makes one wonder if the developed world is ready to give some consideration to John Stuart Mill's idea of the "stationary state," an economy that dispenses with growth and works to achieves intensive rather than extensive gains for its populace.

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would. extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population. I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity. that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compel them to it.

In his 1976 book The Limits to Satisfaction, environmental studies professor William Leiss updates that ideal and bills it as the "conserver society" that rejects the "doctrine of the insatiability of human material needs" -- a postulate of neoclassical economics -- and the idea that "nonhuman nature is ... nothing but a means for human satisfaction." (This reminds me also of Michael Pollan's argument from a few weeks ago that we should garden to lose out "cheap-energy mind" and dreams that someday "not having things might become cooler than having them" -- I am not holding my breath for that.)

According to Leiss's diagnosis, our wasteful society emerges from a process which has systematically confused people about the nature of their needs -- not by implanting false needs (as it is so tempting to argue when we see what other people are buying, or we contemplate the goods in the average 99-cent store) but by making them ever divisible and ever more ambiguous. "Each aspect of a person's needs tends to be broken down into progressively smaller component parts, and therefore it becomes increasingly difficult for that person to integrate the components into a coherent ensemble of needs and a coherent personality structure." We lose our moorings as needs are refined by the persuasion industry, with the consequence that "personal identity becomes a supple mold reshaped daily by the message mix." (Thus, I am a product of my RSS feeds.) Individualtion doesn't guide us to our particualr preferences; rather, an awareness of our individuality is itself a product of our consumer practices. Leiss argues that "the integration of the components tends to become a property of the commodities themselves" -- we become reliant on consumer goods to integrate our self-concept: "The fragmentation of needs requires on the individual's part a steadily more intensive effort to hold together his identity and personal integrity. In concrete terms this amounts to spending more and more time in consumption activities."

Then the problems incipient in the "attention economy" come into play. It takes time to use the goods we are amassing, but time is limited. So we will be motivated to choose activities that allow us to use our goods over ones that don't require things. We won't want to walk in the park when we have a stack of DVDs to watch. Incidentally, This problem is exacerbated immeasurably by the ability to download massive amounts of media for "free." Of course, it's not free; we pay in time, which we seem ill-equippped to properly value in relation to consumption. That is economist Staffan Linder's insight in The Harried Leisure Class, what Leiss calls a Gresham's Law of consumption -- "wants for ever greater numbers of commodities tend to depreciate all types of desires that are not dependent upon the consumption of things." This erodes "craft knowledge" (in Leiss's terminology) or what I think of as a kind of happiness biofeedback -- we lose touch with how to use goods efficiently to satisfy ourselves and concentrate instead on simple maximization. Hence iTunes library with 10,000 songs, many unplayed. Nothing rings more true for me than this comment of Leiss's: "The simple want for larger and larger numbers of things means that the individual must pay correspondingly less attention to the particular qualities of each want and ech thing itself. In other words, the individual must become increasingly indifferent to the fine shadings and nuances of both wants and the objects which he pursues in the search for satisfaction. (Explains a lot about pop culture, I think.) And this process of trying to achieve "increased goods intensity" (as Linder calls it) entices us to incorporate more and more gear into any activity, so that use of the gear preempts the activity itself -- we go camping to make use of all our camping supplies, not because it's fun to sleep in a tent.

Contemplating the situation we find ourselves in, Leiss sounds a lot like Al Gore before the fact: "There are some tolerance limits in the biosphere; the industrial production systems of the developed world are now testing those limits; we do not know what these limits are at present; it is unwise to continue along our present path until we reach or overshoot these limits, since by that time it may be impossible to mitigate the adverse effects or to do so only at the cost of catastrophic social disruptions." He then suggests we might limit our economic development by extending legal rights to nonhuman life and considering the "needs of nonhuman nature," to my mind a terrible way of putting the important concept of considering externalities and the mounting problem of environmental destruction. The phrase suggests I should care about environmentalism because the trees have feelings too, and despite what some believe about the secret life of plants, I remain skeptical. The reason it is imperative to reform our environmental practices -- the only reason that can resonate universally -- is the debt we owe to one another, to other humans who inevitably suffer from the damage we cause and to posterity. A tree can't advocate for itself; only humans can do so on its behalf, and that's when it becomes especially slippery, because who is to say that what the human advocate does is not simply on that specific human's behalf, at the expense of other humans.

Socialism's moral failure (25 Feb 2008)

At Economist's View, Mark Thoma links to an old Paul Krugman piece in which he suggests that socialist economies fail when people cease to subscribe to the ideology that props them up.

neither technological change nor globalization can explain the fact that socialist economies did not merely lag the West: they actually went into decline, and then collapse. Why couldn't they at least hold on to what they had?
I don't think anyone really knows the answer, but let me make a conjecture: the basic problem was not technical, but moral. Communism failed as an economic system because people stopped believing in it, not the other way around.
A market system, of course, works whether people believe in it or not. You may dislike capitalism, even feel that as a system it will eventually fail, yet do your job well because your family needs the money you earn. Capitalism can run, even flourish, in a society of selfish cynics. But a non-market economy cannot. The personal incentives for workers to do their jobs well, for managers to make good decisions, are simply too weak. In the later years of the Soviet Union, workers knew that they would be paid regardless of how hard they tried; managers knew that promotions would depend more on political connections than on performance; and nobody was offered rewards large enough to justify taking unpopular positions or any sort of serious risk.

So socialism was finished once workers stopped believing in the utopian possibilities of shared effort and shared goods. Once personal selfishness takes priority over one's integrity of effort, it becomes a game of manipulating the system and figuring out ways to minimize effort and maximize gain. In other words, one starts acting "rational" -- it may be that as Eric Hoffer suggests in The True Believer this sort of rational behavior can only be suspended in times of upheaval and revolution; eventually the egalitarian will to sacrifice fades and the reality of people having differing levels of talent returns to the fore. It becomes clear that everyone is not really equal in terms of opportunities or outcomes, and people search for new ways to bring their personal advantages to bear on their living conditions. This is the lesson of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, which depicts the Brook Farm experiment as a cauldron of thwarted ego and personal jealousies. The lesson there is that charisma can't be redistributed the same way property can, and it always reestablishes the hierarchies you are trying to eliminate.

Krugman's aside that capitalism may "even flourish" in a cynical society is what strikes me as most interesting. Rigorous self-centeredness and a refusal to compromise personal interests for collective ideals is what helps capitalism function and what permits zealots to proclaim selfishness is virtue and greed is good. Thereby capitalist ideologues can redefine cynicism: It's not rejection of shared ideals but the cowardly refusal to compete and the excuses such shirkers and slackers make.

But capitalism does require a certain set of beliefs to reproduce itself. It's not some remainder that's left after ideology is purged. But it's more a matter of believing that work and pleasure are opposites, that cooperation is a tactic, that competition builds character, that identity is built through collecting consumer goods rather than making things.

Inorganic democracy (10 July 2007)

One more post about Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Retreat From Class. Wood spends a chapter casting doubt on the idea that socialism might evolve naturally out of bourgeois democracy without the need for a revolution. She sees this as arguing that there can be socialism without having to redefine the economic organization of society, which wouldn't amount to socialism at all. Instead, she argues that the claim that politics and economics are independent of each other is one of capitalism's main lines of defense -- this separation allows the exploitative prerogatives of private property to coexist with a discourse of rights in the political sphere. The point at which political rights are used to question exploitation, the political system becomes a battlefield, and the privileged classes will use their concealed leverage, and the barriers inherent to limited representation, to protect their interests.

Wood then raises the point that it's dangerous to become enamored of democracy as an abstract end unto itself. It is a good, as far as socialists are concerned, to the extent that it allows for collective social action, but is there an inherent, organic human desire for democracy, that human nature demands democracy as an expression of its essence? Doesn't seem like it when you look at history. Here's what Wood writes about such advocates of democracy for its own sake:

We are given little guidance as to who in particular might want or need democracy, whether some people might want or need more -- or different aspects -- than others, how a social force capable of bringing it about might come into being -- or indeed why there should be any difficulty or conflict about it at all. If, on the other hand, the democratic drive is not universal, or not immediately so, and yet at the same time is not constituted by material conditions and class relations but is constructed by ideology and politics more or less "autonomously," then are we not again thrown back upon the old utopian elitism which Marx himself denounced? Must we not look to some privileged producers of "discourse" to implant the democratic impulse from without, giving a collective identity to an otherwise shapeless mass, creating the "people" and then imparting to them a socialist or democratic spirit which they cannot bring forth out of their own resources?

This not only sheds light on the hubris of the American project of exporting democracy to the Middle East as if the shapeless masses there were just waiting to be shaped into pseudo-Americans, but it's a reminder of the problem of classes requiring "organic intellectuals" to harness a group's potential power and direct it toward a goal that will continue to motivate and unify them. Because of this, the temptation is always there for those shut out from participating in the revolution to revise that requirement, and come up with ways in which the working class can be told what is in their best interests by those who don't necessary share them, or to argue (a la Laclau and Mouffe) that the working class is not necessarily pertinent to socialism. But there's no way of knowing where the class struggle is headed once the fellow travelers take the wheel.

Hipster politics (9 July 2007)

A longstanding conservative belief holds that until a class has risen above base material needs -- until it is free from necessity -- its politics are invalid, immature, determined, contingent, etc. In other words, they are not disinterested the way politicians, if they are to be truly noble and just, should be. This is the logic behind Rockefeller Republicanism: if politicians are already rich, they have no reason to be corrupt. And it's the same idea that animated cultural politics in the so-called age of sensibility, the late 18th century, when much was made of disinterestedness as a precursor to rational judgment and true feelings (beyond greedy calculation and selfishness), a trend that culminates in Kantian ethics. And as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues in The Retreat From Class, her diatribe against postmodernized socialists like Laclau and Mouffe (my looking for perspective on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy led me to it), the notion that the poverty disbars one from clear-headed politics goes back to Plato. But her main gripe is that the postmodernist presumption that politics and ideology are constituted through discourse and not necessarily material conditions essentially leads to a covert assumption that the working class (bound by "economism"; tainted by material needs) doesn't have the mental or ideological flexibility to promote a broadly successful socialist program. Instead, this would need to be led by a elite cadre of broad-minded intellectuals who can make the case for socialism without being tainted by the potential for getting something concrete out of it. Any desire for socialism beyond the altruistic, disinterested concern for justice and equality is discrediting for the practitioners of what Wood derides as the "New True Socialism" -- a reference to Marx's contempt for those who dreamed of a socialism so utopian that any action toward trying to achieve it was ultimately self-defeating in its apparent ethical impurity.

Wood's argument is useful for contextualizing what is so off-putting about the political feints of hipsters and other fashionable leftists, who want to consider themselves against capitalism but don't want to be involved in anything as grubby as class warfare. They want socialism without having their cocktail parties sullied with tiresome and potentially ill-mannered workers, who might not get their ironic references. Instead they can congregate amongst themselves, swap artworks and go on dumpster-raiding missions and reject animal products, and feel as though they are making a radical political intervention. Rather than focus on the exploitation of workers that sustains capitalism and class difference, and acknowledge that in this exploitation comes the animus to make a real assault on the system, they prefer to see themselves as exploited when the bands they like get too commercial or the neighborhood they live in gets more gentrified and less edgy. The evident distaste hipsters seem to have for those whose interests they occasionally claim to represent (as a pseudo-vanguard, though Wood is quick to point out that Laclau and Mouffe's argument virtually precludes the existence of a vanguard, since there is no real gap between material interests and political practice that they could help close -- it's all constituted ad hoc in discourse), makes their politics so easy for the right to ridicule or dismiss. Plus, they can use the hipster archetype to discredit all leftist politics, plausibly paint it all as self-aggrandizing and patronizing and egoistic, about establishing the do-gooder's identity rather than redressing any actual social problems. Unfortunately for John Edwards, he seems to be an emblem for this in the public's mind -- "he cries a lot for the poor, but he's still getting his fancy haircuts and making his millions." He comes across like an ideological carpetbagger, no matter ho wmuch he plays up his humble roots or courts union rank-and-filers.

In the Age of Sensibility, this phenomenon took the form of men and women of feeling doing things like visiting Bedlam or unwed-mothers' homes and making a show of their feeling hearts by weeping, etc. And if they couldn't do these things, they liked to read about doing them and fantasize. Often in fiction, these sensitive souls were not made for this world -- they felt too much -- and they would die some extremely noble, self-sacrificial death. But the point was to recognize and demonstrate your own virtue, prove that beyond a doubt -- those who suffered were just convenient occasions for the establishing the proofs, and thus in some ways their misfortunes were necessary, not something that was to be eradicated. Of course, conservatives argue all along that there's no eliminating others' suffering, which is often their own fault and ultimately their own responsibility to rectify. So conservatives can work to ameliorate suffering without seeming hypocritical. They never pretend not to feel superior to the objects of their pity, so that their charity comes with a feeling of superiority doesn't seem to invalidate it.

So the problem remains, the problem that has started me reading these political science texts -- how does one declass oneself so as to become a fellow traveler with the exploited classes without exacerbating their exploitation? In other words how does a bourgeois like me do anything to advance socialist causes without actually exploiting those who I mean to help via the process of establishing my political bona fides, for my own peace of mind? How does one contribute to the cause despite not being an "organic intellectual" of the class whose consciousness you imagine requires raising? I'm guessing there's no simple answer to this question, but I imagine it involves finding yourself way out of your comfort zone, doing the hard work of bridging across the habitus gap between classes, trying to communicate with those indifferent to your plight or your sacrifice. But maybe that's too pessimistic.

Terrorism and class struggle (5 July 2007)

Is Islamic terrorism an expression of class struggle? Or, in other words, is it a consequence of the deprivation that comes from disparities of income and the injustice that derives from systematic exploitation? Is it merely a religious expression of proletarian discontent? In his Capital column in today's WSJ, David Wessel takes a look at the research Princeton economist Alan Krueger has done on the closely related question of terrorism's relationship to poverty levels.

"As a group, terrorists are better educated and from wealthier families than the typical person in the same age group in the societies from which they originate," Mr. Krueger said at the London School of Economics last year in a lecture soon to be published as a book, "What Makes a Terrorist?"
"There is no evidence of a general tendency for impoverished or uneducated people to be more likely to support terrorism or join terrorist organizations than their higher-income, better-educated countrymen," he said. The Sept. 11 attackers were relatively well-off men from a rich country, Saudi Arabia....
"The evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as an important cause of support for terrorism or of participation in terrorist activities," Mr. Krueger asserts. The 9/11 Commission stated flatly: Terrorism is not caused by poverty.
So what is the cause? Suppression of civil liberties and political rights, Mr. Krueger hypothesizes. "When nonviolent means of protest are curtailed," he says, "malcontents appear to be more likely to turn to terrorist tactics."

This line of inquiry reminded me of some of the issues at stake in Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (I expended so much mental energy trying to extract coherent ideas from that dense thicket of opaque abstraction that I'll grasp at any occasion to make reference to it now.) Looking at the Marxist tenet that the working class has a unique interest in socialism, they argue that politics may not necessarily spring from economic interests -- that the politics and the ideology supporting them may develop independently, that they are contingent and constructed ad hoc by discursive practices at any given moment. (In some ways this is an elaborate way of making Frank Luntz's or George Lakoff's point about framing. Carefully crafted language can shape the debate surrounding issues in ways that influence people regardless of what their economic interests dictates they should believe.) Hence demagogues or interloping intellectuals can attempt to contrive a unified movement around basically any idea that generates a reaction, that seems to address sources of discontent, which themselves may be recharacterized in various ways by a skilled rhetorician.

If politics, when separated via language and identity-construction issues from economic grievances, indicates the possibility of the "radical democracy" Mouffe and Laclau theorize, then terrorism detached from economic misery may not be an symptom of the lack of democratic values, as Krueger and Wessel suggest in the article, but may instead be a twisted expression of them, a misguided belief that the "people's will" is being implemented directly rather than through institutional change, whether it be revolutionary or incremental. The idea that politics is merely a matter of discourse, of momentary tactics of garnering attention and magnetizing eyeballs, opens it to the conceivable possibility that it can be shifted dramatically not by building up awareness of class struggle, formalizing class unity, intensifying the contradictions inherent in the relations of production and so on -- working with a theorized praxis backed by a historical analysis -- but instead through sudden irrational interventions, terrorist acts designed to assign a different valence to governing notions in circulation. Such a theory of "radical democracy" may make desperate acts seem credible and efficacious. If you rule out subjects in history and plausible ends such subject may have, then terrorism -- a means with no achievable end -- seems a reasonable political practice.

What's left (14 May 2007)

Zygmunt Bauman offers two defining principles of Leftism, something that seemed pertinent after the detour into Hegemony and Socialist Strategy over the weekend.

The first assumption is that it is the duty of the community to insure its individual members against individual misfortune. And the second is that, just as the carrying capacity of a bridge is measured by the strength of its weakest support, so the quality of a society should be measured by the quality of life of its weakest members. These two constant and non-negotiable assumptions set the left on a perpetual collision course with the realities of the human condition under the rule of capitalism; they necessarily lead to charges against the capitalist order, with its twin sins of wastefulness and immorality, manifested in social injustice.

In other words, leftist politics are a matter of supplying a social safety net and inverting the assumption that socioeconomic benefits trickle down from the top, after the wealthiest of society are given the leeway to pursue their greed to the utmost. Wealth provides a wider latitude of opportunity, and those on the Right tend to argue that inhibiting those opportunities compromises possibilities for everyone on down the totem pole.

But if Bauman's principles are respected, we must consider the person in society with the least social and financial and human capital as the focus of our concerns. Capitalist society's failure to enhance these people's capital is what makes it guilty of "wastefulness and immorality" -- strange charges when you consider capitalism's heedless drive for efficiency is generally its operating principle. Capitalism tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, who then use their enlarged opportunities to continue to consolidate their advantages. Political disagreements often revolve around whether this process generates opportunities for everyone else, has no particular net effect on opportunity, or positively harms those left behind. That in turn hinges on how one views the problems of relative wealth, egalitarianism, environmental risk, community solidarity, ambition's place in meritocracy, the danger of moral hazard in social protections, and so on. To my mind, the most compelling argument regarding the dangers of economic inequality is that it yields political inequality; the wealthy are able to seize control of government and use it to protect their interests at the expense of opportunity for others -- social mobility is inhibited and democratic processes devolve into sham practices, with consumer choice masquerading as political choice, and prosperity of the "look how many flat-screen TVs Americans bought" sort supplanting freedom. So in a statement like this...

Unless closely watched and checked, markets tend to produce a lot of waste and lead to the deepening polarisation of human conditions and life prospects. They also generate insecurity, promoting and reinforcing feelings of abandonment, alienation and loneliness.

...I would want the remark about waste clarified, given some kind of measure. It may be that capitalism's hostility to waste, its tendency to label nonproductive behavior as inefficient and wasteful, that yields the polarization, the alienation, the loneliness. Capitalism's view of waste needs to be set against a leftist version that's persuasive, a definition of waste that hinges on a sense of a wasted life, of insecurity as wasted, counterproductive and socially corrosive mental energy.

Bauman translates his two defining principles into this definition:

The left is best described as a stance of permanent criticism of the realities of social life, which always fall short of the values a society professes and promises to serve. The left is not committed to any specific model of human togetherness: the sole model it refuses to tolerate is a regime that deems itself perfect - or at least the best of all possible worlds - and therefore immune to questioning.

This definition shows Bauman has assimilated of Laclau and Mouffe's point of there being no given, natural inevitable constituency for socialism, and it hearkens to the notion of permanent revolution. He seems to elevate critical thinking to the level of an end in itself, not necessarily because critical thinking is a practice commensurate with the dignity of humankind (which is why I'd advocate it for its own sake) but because of a realist assessment of what's possible. This is akin to Zizek's prescription for "pessimistic leftism", touched on in this brief interview.

But ultimately he conceives of Leftism's mission to promulgate the "social state" -- something like Sweden. Which means the left must come up with an answer to the ammunition provided by stories like this one, which suggests the incentives in the Swedish system are creating freeloaders rather than the fully dignified humans we leftists would like to see.

Happiness as nodal point (12 May 2007)

The following thoughts were occasioned by reading two wildly dissimilar works in conjunction: Will Wilkinson's recent Cato Institute policy paper about happiness research and Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. First of all, they couldn't be further apart on the readability scale. Wilkinson writes clean, compelling prose sprinkled with wit and pointed, impassioned polemic, while Laclau and Mouffe evince the distinct aversion to active verbs and discernible grammatical subjects that you often find in works of nebulous social theory. And they initially seem to be coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Wilkinson, a libertarian, argues for as little governmental intervention as possible into the lives of sovereign individuals; Laclau and Mouffe are socialists trying to conceive of a method to bring about "radical democratic politics" to forward Leftist interests, arguing essentially that the individual has no identity outside of political struggle. Laclau and Mouffe are trying to find ways to build political blocs, to develop ad hoc unity among a disparate group so it can then effect social change. Wilkinson seems to be arguing against the social usefulness of collective will.

Nevertheless, maybe because I am misinterpreting them both, but I found a surprising potential for synthesis between the two works, mainly because Wilkinson's eagerness to discount happiness research leads him to take some rather nuanced, relativistic stances at various points about they way people comprehend their own interests, just as Laclau and Mouffe, eager to dispatch essentialist, given notions of what it means to be working class, systematically undermine all appeals to universal notions. There's no one determinant of class identity, any more than there is one definition of what happiness is, as experienced. (Whether an objective notion of well-being that we are not actively conscious of can be considered happiness is another question.)

Wilkinson cites approvingly a passage by philosopher Nicolas White, who argue that "As we develop a picture of what life is to be like, we don't start from a 'framework' concept of happiness (an idea of what the picture on the puzzle will be), to which to tailor our particular aims so that they'll fit into it.... For the most part we build up a conception of what happiness would be out of the aims that we have." Compare that with this passage from Laclau and Mouffe: "The fixity of every social element in the first theorizations of hegemony proceeded, as we saw, from the indissoluable link between the hegemonized task and the class that was supposed to be its natural agent.... But, insofar as the task has ceased to have any necessary link with a class, its identity is given to it solely by its articulation within a hegemonic formulation. Its identity, then, has become purely relational. And as this system of relations has itself ceased to be fixed and stable -- thereby making hegemonic practices possible -- the sens of every social identity appears constantly deferred." In other words happiness is contingent on aims, and aims are contingent on given social formations, and what values can become dominant (hegemonic) through the way they are articulated and their appeal broadened or made constitutive of identity for those swayed by them. The inefficacy of happiness research to pin down a consistent definition opens up the space in which hegemony can be constructed. Political work consists of defining happiness in such a way that suits a particular bloc while conveying a sense of individual empowerment (a sense of concrete identity and fulfillment of that identity's potential) to those throwing support behind the bloc.

Happiness research, then, is discourse attempting to perform this work, constructing happiness in a politically useful way and presenting that definition as natural and inevitable. Individual happiness and the collective good administered politically thereby merge into a single conception, albeit one that is always contested and is ever-shifting, no matter how much it insists it is objective and transcendent and eternally true. To gloss White, not only is the picture on the puzzle indeterminable until you start to work at putting it together, but the pieces themselves are always shifting, as is the logic of the rules for solving the puzzle.

In short, happiness may be what L&M (not the cigarette) call "nodal points," semi-fixed notions in the field of relations that seem universal and transcendent but are actually up for grabs. Despite their tendency to shift, we still rely on them to orient ourselves in construing our own goals and in conceiving how to relate to peers and how to structure who the enemies are.