People are pretty upset about mitt & big bird. How about being upset that he's a repugnant capitalist cretin? Why won't your president say "you know mitt,  you really can't speak about freedom and choice because you got rich by destroying people's lives, and you said aloud that you have no regard for the most exploited people in society." Your president can't say this because he agrees that "free enterprise" is the greatest system ever devised, and that basically people deserve what they get (rich or dispossessed)..  and government can help when they fail (bailout or welfare).

Isn't it staggering that the debate moderator had to INSIST that the contenders emphasize their differences? For as Obama proudly pointed out, most of his policies were Republican ideas (health care, taxation, education)

just this.

http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/

"Congratulations." An open letter from Herr Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, to acclaimed film director Christopher Nolan

Dear Sir,

Congratulations are due to you for having produced one of the finest pieces of epic Fascist cinema in this young century. Your depiction of the crude and bloodthirsty Anarchist menace was first-rate, surpassed in quality only by your portrayal of the honorable men of the uniformed and secret police – the gallant forces that safeguard your nation’s prosperity. I was particularly pleased by the hero’s deployment of vast personal wealth in the interest of state security, though it would have pleased me more to see certain proletarians proudly depicted – the better to contrast their earnest national zeal to the cruel cynicism of the brutal communist minority. You correctly balked at modern liberal tolerance, demonstrating that proud men of pure racial stock are those best suited to lead the American Reich, shrewdly proving that Blacks, Jews, Homosexuals, Foreigners, Invalids, and of course Women are unfit for prominent social positions. (For instance, both of the Women featured in the film are correctly identified as duplicitous, whoring cheats; the aged Black underling as inept; the wheezing Invalid as a scheming brute; while the Homosexuals and Cripples seem to have been omitted entirely; I also applaud your cleverness in erasing any subversive trait from the character of the skilled actor and known Jew Mr. Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

Many fine details, including the technological sophistication demonstrated on film as well as in production, as well as the sly critique of market capitalism and embrace of fascism, will go unheralded – but the masses will yet internalize the crux of the matter: that the most materially prosperous, technologically advanced, and racially superior men of the nation are its greatest hope for salvation in the face of the savage unrest that springs from social pollution and cultural degradation.

Kudos once more, Sir! The Führer himself could not have imagined a finer film to illustrate the wisdom of overwhelming strength, the severity of social truth, and the glory of the nation! As I know well, a nation in the midst of stubborn economic depression must sometimes be reminded of its eternal mandate for global domination -- and your film shall serve as a fine reminder to the grand American Reich, and indeed to the entire world.  Long live the most pure Race! the Empire of the United States! and the brashly apolitical “storytelling” of American Cinema!


Admiringly Yours,

Dr. Goebbels

Persistence

My favorite title of anything, ever:

The Great Law of Subordination Considered; or the Insolence and Insufferable Behaviour of SERVANTS in England duly enquired into

This work, by one Daniel Defoe, is quoted by EP Thompson in Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, and was published in England in 1724. Yes, that Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), who, I must say, seemed to have a knack for funny titles: he also penned the riveting Political History of the Devil (whom he apparently considered a very real and potent historical actor) and an essay on Conjugal Lewdness.

This is not all fun and games, however. Insufferable servants are but one target of the menacing, puritanical scribe: the original title of the latter essay was supposedly Conjugal Lewdness or, Matrimonial Whoredom, which later became A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. In it, Defoe outlines in no uncertain terms his contempt for all forms of contraception (an "abuse of the marriage bed"), comparing it to infanticide.

The colonial underpinnings and primitive economics of the Robinson Crusoe novel (whose actual title runs more than sixty words) were joyfully appropriated by classical economists of the ensuing century to illustrate their claims about free market relations of production and trade. The old man (KM) even references the novel in Capital (mostly to lampoon the Smithian admirers) but also to make a point about the labor theory of value.

It's odd how works find their way into the cultural lexicon, and persist, in various forms, within it. The SERVANTS essay title reminds me of the Masterpiece series Downton Abbey, a gossipy upstairs/downstairs drama set in an English manor just after the turn of the century. I won't go into a big thing on it now, but here is what I find most interesting about the series: the way in which the "downstairs" staff resembles the staff of any upscale restaurant today. From the menu, to the preparation, to the service (the characters describe themselves as working "in service") of meals, there is a strong affinity between the manners (or 'manors' if you like) of this "bygone" era and our own. Friends who work in expensive restaurants here in New York are taught to cater to every need of patrons (on whom they receive "slips" of relevant information -- who the guest is, who they work for/who works for them, their preferences, and so forth). Going for a meal should be just as seamless as the cleaning of the house, the care of the children, and the managing of daily needs, all of which is outsourced to the city's working classes.

One of the show's taglines makes reference to the "disappearing class system" of pre-industrial England. By 1912 (the year in which the series begins) industrial capitalism is firmly established in England, and the aristocracy is quickly fading into irrelevance. Or is it? To this day a "royal family," a monarchy, retains a place in English political and social life -- but I think there are less obvious, and much more interesting ways in which this system persists. The service industry is the pre-eminent example. Hordes of us are at work serving the rich and petty rich, obeying feudal codes of conduct, and making upstairs run smoothly while keeping the machinery of downstairs hidden from view.

As the old man said, nothing ever really goes away -- certain feudal relations persist under capitalism -- just as manor manners persist today. Downton is based on current source material, not a century-old novel, and although I haven't seen the entire series yet (I'm giddily about to start season two), but it's clear that "the future" is rapidly displacing "the past." But the most interesting moments are those in which we see the ways in which the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. The Great Law of Subordination is still very much in force, probably because those pesky servants remain such an insufferable and insolent lot. I duly demand an enquiry!

Left Forum

This past weekend, the Left Forum was once again held in NYC's Pace University. An exciting year, because of the energy injected into Left thought & movement by Occupy Wall Street. I was there mostly in work capacity, attending panels on health care and tabling for PNHP. I did go to a couple of other panels though, including two with Stanley Aronowitz, who has become a real mentor of mine. One was on the Jobless Future problem: we are tending to become a society in which there is plenty of employment, but no jobs (jobs understood as having high wages, stable hours and working conditions, ample benefits including livable pension, and job security). The days of union jobs in stable, continuous operations like manufacturing are gone. Temporary, part-time, contracted, precarious work is the new normal.

A person's "career" in just about any professional area is increasingly a never-ending series of internships (often unpaid) and contract & freelance work. Microsoft gives its corporate/tech hires a choice: take lower wages in exchange for steady (eg W2) employment, or get paid more but work under short-term contract (eg 1099). With costs of living (housing, food, education) on the rise, is it any wonder that people increasingly choose the higher income model? Fully half of Microsoft corporate workers are contracted -- no job security, no long-term benefits. The same is true of blue-collar work -- as union density erodes and manufacturing disappears or becomes non-union, job security in any job shall have been a thing of the past.

What does this all mean? The jobless future is not a future without work -- there will still be plenty of that -- but rather a future of work without end, in which we cobble together a living with multiple part-time and temporary jobs with no hope of retiring much less having health-care or other needs provided for. People like my parents, who have worked "steady," professional jobs for most of their lives, see retirement in jeopardy as pensions suffer on the marketplace and costs of things like medical care skyrocket (more than half of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills). Unemployment or under-employment will become the new normal (forget what I just said about there being "plenty" of work; profit-generating surplus value -- which capital accumulation relies on and is driven by -- is increasingly extracted not from human labor, but from credit/debt models, obviating some of the need for a worker society. The formation of consumer society is a topic for another essay).

So not only will there be no end to the work day or work week as we are forced to take on more and more work to keep up will falling wages and increasing costs, there will be no end to the work life. And we find ourselves back in the days of endless work, basically from birth until early death. This is the life of children who worked a century ago in coal mines, or in today's garment sweatshops, or of the slaves on American plantations. What opportunities will there be to develop intellectual, cultural, artistic values and competencies? This is a future that, while likely, I'm not willing to accept as inevitable (see previous post -- we can note tendencies like the jobless future, but we can't guarantee them). Daily life is a complicated, compromised, and frankly misunderstood phenomenon, and we had better think carefully about its makeup, especially its relationship to work.

Negative Evolution

Duration is lived experience. Time, as we know it, is an artifice -- an attempt by the perceiving mind to order experience according to utility. We think of time in terms of what we can do with it. Thus we carve up our lives into years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, vainly attempting to impose finite, metric order upon infinite duration. Nevertheless, spacetime is in constant motion, and the accumulation of that duration, what we call the past, both constitutes and eats into the present. Duration is therefore a creative process, constantly producing the past, present, and future, not to mention evolutionary movement.

These are precepts of Henri Bergson's philosophy, as laid out in Creative Evolution (1907). To make an argument here, I would need to go into much deeper detail, but I want to sketch out a critique (which I'm sure has been made many times since Bergson's argument appeared): is development always positive?

For Bergson, duration is always a creative process that, like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulates more and more as it moves: more life, more experience, more emotion, more energy, and so forth. He is critical of the so-called "life-sciences," which he argues are only capable of examining the ways in which energy wastes away -- death processes -- rather than truly generative phenomena, such as evolution.

But surely there is a moment for negation? Bergson is not a dialectician, and it shows -- for Hegel, writing a century earlier, there was no movement without the negative. Things only emerge or move that have tarried with and incorporated the negative, through a dialectical process of development. Bergson seems to do away with the negative, as if all development were positive, just experience accumulating upon experience, not toward anything necessarily (he critiqued teleological "finalism"), but nevertheless forward.

Contemporaries of Bergson, most notably Nietzsche, would argue for the possibility (even necessity) of negative development. Not every step is a step forward. History moves, but is it always moving forward? Surely there is a role for retrogression, as well as progression, in the study of life, or society, or history. I don't mean to say that the past is repeatable -- you can't go home again -- at least, you could go home, but it wouldn't be the same home, or you wouldn't be the same, which amounts to alienation in either case. No, the past isn't repeatable, but duration, for me, is not just a process by which things are created. It can also be a process by which they are destroyed.  

Critique of Postmodern Intellectualism in the Mode of Dada

From another blog:

"When you click the link for the Postmodernism Generator (www.elsewhere.org/pomo), a software robot working behind the scenes instantly throws together a lit-crit parody with a title like this: "Realities of Absurdity: The dialectic paradigm of context in the works of Fellini." And a text that runs along these lines: "In a sense, the main theme of the works of Fellini is the futility, and hence the stasis, of precapitalist sexuality. An abundance of deconceptualisms concerning a self-falsifying reality may be revealed."

Reload the page, and you get 'The Dialectic of Sexual Identity: Objectivism and Baudrillardist hyperreality' and then 'The Meaninglessness of Expression: Capitalist feminism in the works of Pynchon'"

Wallace Shawn -- The Fever

Just got tickets to see Wallace Shawn perform his one man play The Fever on Sunday. Read about it here: http://socialistworker.org/2007-1/620/620_13_TheFever.shtml

Spring 2012 courses

Here are the classes I'm taking this semester:

Social Theory of Time and Space : Stanley Aronowitz
American Labor and Globalization : Frances Fox Piven
Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit (uncredited small-group seminar) : Stanley Aronowitz


Prof. Stanley Aronowitz saronowitz@gc.cuny.edu
Soc. 80000- Social Theory of Time & Space {17533}
Thursdays, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m. Room TBA, 3 credits
Time and space are relatively neglected topics in the social sciences. But they are central to the natural sciences which have fundamentally altered our conceptions. This course explores the concepts of time and space in social theory. Beginning with how physics and biology address these questions, we will see how philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, and Alfred North Whitehead dealt with them. Finally, the work of E.P. Thompson, Henri Lefebvre, Norbert Elias and the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse will be discussed. Among the readings:
Lee Smolin- The Trouble with Physics
Levins and Lewontin- The Dialectical Biologist
Bergson- Matter and Memory
Bachelard- Dialectic of Duration
Whitehead- Selections from Process and Reality
Thompson- "Time, Work- Discipline…"
Lefebvre- Production of Space; Critique of Everyday Life volume 3.
Norbert Elias- Time: an Essay
Adorno- Selections from Negative Dialectic
Marcuse- One Dimensional Man
Some of these readings will be in the form of class presentations.

Frances Fox Piven 
LABR 601 – Labor and Globalization
Course Description:
This course will examine the impact of the globalization of production on work itself, as well as on workers and international labor movements. It will present globalization as a central problem for both developed and developing economies and as a dilemma for U.S. workers and their unions. Students will analyze the history and function of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, determining how these institutions influence the global flow of capital and labor as well as the flow of goods and services. The course covers topics essential for understanding workers' issues and rights in contemporary economies. These include the impact of global outsourcing; the rise of women in workforces around the world and the implications for issues of gender; organizing in a multi-national context; increasing poverty and inequality; and the decreased regulatory powers of states relative to multinational corporations as a result of free-trade agreements and neo-liberal development policies. All topics will be studied from a historical perspective that traces the development of capitalism from its beginnings in nation-states to its current hegemony in the global marketplace. Students will study responses of the labor movement to capital flight and to the movement of jobs and production across national borders, including efforts at cross-border organizing. They will examine the extent and effectiveness of global labor strategies and the potential of broad-based coalitions to protect workers' rights.

To get this going again, I'm posting a response I've written, but not yet sent, to a thread in the Health Care for the 99% working group, of which, as an organizer for Physicians for a National Health Program, I am now a part. HC99% is a working group of Occupy Wall Street, and we have been discussing a logo for our group. Initial designs, much in the mode of OWS, have included a clenched fist, along with a symbol of medicine or health care. Members of the group have objected to our using this imagery, suggesting that it is too violent and confrontational, and will turn off the public. Here is my response:

Occupy Wall Street is a resistance movement, and resistance movements rely on powerful images of resistance to motivate, galvanize, and mobilize people. Some may take issue with this opening formula -- that OWS is a resistance movement -- but given the hegemonic nature of the target (and don't get it twisted, there is a target: it's right there in the name), the brutal response of the authorities, and the popular anger the movement has both aroused and, we hope, organized and directed, I think this is an accurate characterization, especially in the global context of resistance to austerity and corporate state control of life. The extent to which we, as a health care oriented group within OWS, align ourselves with that struggle is, it appears, still an open question.

What is the fight for universal health care? Is it a fight against corporate forces and the state apparatuses they control? A struggle of the popular will against that of private capital? Is it a fight at all? If it's not a fight, then by all means let's tone down the imagery. If it's just a matter of educating folks and waiting for people in power to do the right thing, then yes, we should use less confrontational imagery. But in my view, this is a confrontation, and we must be prepared (with images, ideas, and mutual love and respect for one another) to face it. OWS is a resistance movement, which is why I joined it. This is also why I joined the struggle for health care, a struggle that embodies the totality of what is at stake: our very lives. The FIST, raised proudly in the air, unafraid, unwavering, willing to risk everything for the sake of everything. This is the essence of resistance.

I understand that people follow OWS for different reasons, and that many DO NOT follow OWS at all; and furthermore, these are often the folks that must be involved if we are to be successful. I do not want to struggle for its own sake (although I would); I want to struggle because I want to win. On the other hand, I don't want to be so worried that calling a spade a spade will 'turn people off' that we lose our own values in the process. As scholars of social struggle and organizers alike know, we don't build strength by deferring the struggle, we build power through the struggle -- precisely by engaging in struggle; not by accommodating fear, but by confronting it, and overcoming it. One may agree that OWS is a resistance movement, but disagree that this is true of health care (the press, for instance, will refer to this as "the health care debate," as if there were somehow two equally legitimate sides, or as if there were anything decent or civil or fair about what is in fact a forceful dispossession of people from their lives).

Why, then, do we organize in the OWS context? Simply because it's "hot"? I don't believe so. As Steve pointed out, our imagery does serve many purposes, some of which may be contradictory given different contexts. But facing contradiction is the heart of what we are doing: we face the social contradiction of a vastly wealthy society that refuses to provide care to huge numbers of people living within it. My goal is not to convince people that there is no struggle -- that we all just need to think clearly and get along and things will work out -- no, my goal is to bring people into the struggle in a way that prepares them for the brute response of the adversary, a response we see rehearsed by police in the streets, authorities in the courts, and bulldozers on the hospital grounds.

What does this mean for our imagery? For me it means that we should not be shy about putting our anger and indignation, but much more importantly our resolve, determination and spirit of solidarity, on display -- and the most coherent image of that spirit is a proudly raised fist.

So first of all, I thank Josh and everyone who has contributed to the design process -- the images have been wonderful.

Secondly, (and I know this has been a long message already) I want to voice STRONG support for retaining the image of clenched fists in our logos and materials.

Thank you all,
Sam