That’s the title of George Scialabba’s latest collection of essays, which you can purchase here. Instead of rambling on and on about the virtues of my dear friend, George, I’ll just refer you to my fellow blogger, Robert Birnbaum, who does a fine job getting to the point. And please feel free to follow the links, all of which prove just as worthy as the subject himself.

Otherwise, happy reading!

Categories: Art, Culture, Domestic Politics, Global Affairs, Political Economy, Politics & Society, War

Tagged: For the Republic, George Scialabba, Republicanism, Robert Birnbaum, The Intellectual

Work and Leisure

rivercityblues

Posted on May 18, 2013

Walter Russell Mead offers a welcome intervention on the right, misleadingly titled, “The Jobs Question: Work is a Human Right.” It’s really a somewhat haphazard meditation on Keynes’ extraordinary 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Furthermore, it comes off as an attempt at figuring out where Keynes’s genius might fit into a more conservative yet forward-thinking puzzle. Mead gets the essay mostly right, and there’s no doubt Keynes was a product of his class (i.e. a snob), but he misses some key points.

Shortly after Keynes writes:

Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!

He continues:

…There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy…. I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible.

In other words, like Mead, Keynes is confident that once the citizenry is liberated from what Marx called “alienated labor,” they will learn to sing, or do something that brings them a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. And perhaps also like Mead (Mead is too coy on this count), Keynes believed a more leisurely society would also lead to a more “shared” one.

Here are three related points concerning Mead’s reading of Keynes:

1. Mead takes it for granted that Keynes thought the 1930s dispensation more-or-less rewarded those who were “talented’ and abused those who were talentless, and that Keynes’s hope, therefore, was to transfer cash and leisure from the talented to the talentless. But Keynes was smart enough to realize (perhaps like Mead — again, I don’t know) that 1930s capitalism was a far more complex beast than that. Sure, it rewarded the “talented.” But it rewarded a certain kind of “talented,” one (more-or-less) attuned to the “money-motive.” Keynes’s hope, then, wasn’t that the talentless would be treated with dignity, but that once the economy allowed everyone to be treated with dignity (via shared profits and leisure) hidden and new talents in everyone would be allowed to emerge. So no, Keynes (unlike Nietzsche) did not dread a future composed of mindless and soulless couch potatoes. He hoped for a future where the very moral and esthetic judgments of the 1930s would ramify into all sorts of more shared and unexpected directions, where the terms “talented” and “talentless’ would therefore be rendered meaningless. That’s what makes Keynes’s essay so utopian.

2. Unlike Mead, Keynes didn’t subscribe to an ahistorical notion of “human nature.” In this sense, Keynes is at home with most biologists, anthropologists, and historians today, who agree that it is both unwise and impossible to posit such an abstraction in light of both historical and present-day diversity.

3. Mead relies too heavily on the work/leisure distinction. Keynes’ hope was that work would become leisure, and leisure would become work. For example, instead of everyone spending 40 hours a week behind a desk filing paperwork because they need the cash for rent and utilities (and calling this “work”), automation and advanced social organization would eventually allow for everyone to spend 25 hours of that 40 doing whatever the hell they want to do — brewing beer, building furniture, making or watching films, making or putting together wardrobes, singing in the shower, etc. — and not worrying too much about whether any of that counts as work or leisure. In other words, just like the “talented” and “talentless” distinction would become meaningless in a more shared and leisurely world, so too would the work/leisure distinction.

As for what I believe: On Mon/Wed/Fri I think Keynes will prove a very prescient thinker in 100 or 200 years times, on Tues/Thurs I think he’ll be considered a total naif in that same duration, and on the weekends, I try not to think about it either way… although I’m not doing a good job at that last bit at the moment.

Categories: Culture, Political Economy, Politics & Society

Tagged: John Maynard Keynes, Leisure, Meritocracy, Progress, The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead, Work

If You’re One of Those People Who Always Says “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch,” Read This (Likewise, If You Know Someone Who Always Says This, Send Them This)

rivercityblues

Posted on May 16, 2013

Since Facebook keeps asking me what’s on my mind…

Here’s a lecture on the common libertarian/conservative refrain “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It means you can’t get something for nothing, and it is often employed to suggest that progressive taxation, income or wealth transfers, union-enforced wages and benefits, and any other “intervention” into the market amounts to shifting the costs of “laziness” from individual moochers to society at large, especially among those who work the hardest. In other words, all said policies amount to “handouts” of one sort or another that are in fact far from free. I’ve been meaning to address this argument for awhile, so here goes.

1. There are a number of ways to respond to this, but I’ll begin with the most obvious: the difference between people who push for “liberal” or “left” socioeconomic policies and people who push for “conservative” or “right” socioeconomic policies rarely boils down to the fact that the former are pro-moocher and the latter are anti-moocher. There are plenty of moochers on all sides, and more to the point, there are plenty of people (most people) on all sides who don’t like mooching in general. Another word for “mooching” — not entirely synonymous but good enough for the task at hand — is “unfairness.” The basic point is that most people don’t like unfairness, and they’d like to see less of it.

2. So why, a libertarian/conservative might ask, do liberals, socialists, and anyone who isn’t a right libertarian or conservative (or an anarchist) support progressive taxation, labor rights and minimum/living wages, and/or means-tested entitlements? Well, this is a very complicated question, but the quickest answer is that modern history suggests that most of these measures tend to chip away at net unfairness. I know this might sound outrageous to people already inclined to believe otherwise, and I know it sounded that way to me as well, back in my libertarian/conservative days, but it’s very difficult not to arrive at this conclusion once you’ve taken an honest and sustained look at the long-term trend-lines.

3. Let’s start with the fundamental presumptions that lead certain people to believe that income or wealth “redistributions” are generally unfair. The leading presumption has it that people more-or-less receive what they put in, thanks to a free market system that ensures as such. Therefore, income/wealth transfers amount to nothing more or less than stealing some people’s hard-earned rewards in order to unjustly treat others. This would make sense if (a) people more-or-less received what they put in, and (b) this happened because (if/when) the free market was left to do its business without pesky government intervention.

Re (a), it’s impossible to decide, on any moral grounds, when someone’s actually received their just desert. This is because for some people mowing the lawn or fighting on the front-lines is worthy of far more economic reward than, say, middle-managing in a retail chain or gambling derivatives on Wall Street. And for other people, the contrary is true. But even when you work with the most consensus opinions, there’s still no way anyone in their right mind could argue that we live in a society (or have ever lived in a society) where most workers more-or-less receive what they put in. Most people, for example, don’t believe that ordinary hedge fund managers should take in double/triple/quadruple the compensation of the average car mechanic or Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant, but that’s the case. Just FYI, the highest paid hedge fund managers make more than 2000 times your average worker. And American CEOs, on average, make over 300 times their average employees. I suppose there are a few saps out there who really believe these ratios correspond to the work put in, or in the parlance of “conservatives” and “libertarians,” that this is what you end up with when “free lunches” aren’t in play, but for the bulk of us, we realize that there are other factors deciding the outcome.

Re (b), there is zero evidence to imply that consensus notions of fairness are more likely to be fulfilled if/when libertarians or conservatives have their way and the government “deregulates” the “free market.” In fact, there is overwhelming evidence in the past century or so to suggest the precise opposite: that when progressive tax codes are sabotaged, when labor rights and wages are immiserated, when social investments and wealth transfers are sacrificed on the altar of “trickle-down economics” (not to mention a “strong defense policy”), things become a whole lot more unfair. Not only that, but everything gets a whole lot uglier, too: National and global indicators re working hours, working conditions, education outcomes, health outcomes, poverty, social mobility, social trust, incarceration, happiness, community stability, material infrastructure, civil liberties, and long-term forecasts concerning social and ecological sustainability. Libertarians and conservatives love to point to Stalin or Castro as examples of what happens when you don’t listen to them. But the range of modern polities is far more diverse than the capitalist/socialist dichotomy allows, and the fact of the matter is that (mutatis mutandis) socioeconomic setups that are often called “social democracies,” “mixed economies,” or in our case, “welfare states” — setups that tend to include steep progressive tax codes, strong labor rights and wages/benefits, and robust public programs and investments — often prove far more fair and less ugly in the aggregate than their more “free market” counterparts. The most successful polities at the moment, from what I gather, also integrate substantive “workplace democracy” and “community stabilization” initiatives into the social democratic/social liberal mix. The Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain, for example, or if we’re talking about the states, the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland or the Bank of North Dakota. In other words, lo and behold… when appropriate checks and balances are put in place to guard against vast power, wealth, and education disparities (which are all of the same cloth), you end up with less hideous social outcomes.

(4. So far, I’ve been dealing with income/compensation. It’s important to note that when you shift to aggregate wealth, the ratios are far more shocking. David Tepper, the highest compensated hedge fund manager, for example, made President Obama’s salary every 14 minutes in 2009. but that’s not the most shocking part. The thing about Capitalism is that, assuming you’re educated enough and privileged enough, your annual income ends up representing a sliver of your net worth, since a good chunk of the latter exponentially accrues from ownership investments in the stock market. So even though Tepper’s 4 billion earned in 2009 or John Paulson’s 5 billion earned in 2010 already account for a terrifyingly large portion of total personal income, the wealth disparity proves exponentially more disconcerting. For instance, the richest 400 Americans are now worth more than the bottom 50 percent combined. Anyone who thinks we can enjoy real freedom, democracy, and fairness under such conditions is out of their mind. And none of this even touches the problem of inherited wealth, which since the “neoliberal” dawn of Reagan and Thatcher, has without exaggeration returned to gilded age and/or medieval standards…)

5. Ironically, even though the “no free lunch” argument persists among right-wingers, often in conjunction with the implied or explicit charge of “laziness,” virtually all capitalist economists gave up on the notion of “just desert” as early as the 1870s, when “marginalist” economics first started coming to the fore. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but here’s a crude summary: before the Civil War, America was comprised of majority independent farmers and artisans. While there were still social classes, and still a whole lot of unfairness, especially when it came to race, gender, and a slew of more “cultural” questions, one could argue (with something like a straight face) that a hard day’s work more-or-less resulted in a good-day’s pay. This is because people were much more likely to build and repair their own shelter, farm and cook their own chow, till their own land, sew and clean their own garments, so on and so forth. In sum, people were more “self-sufficient” or “self-reliant.” They weren’t nearly as autonomous as Ayn Randians and Milton Friedmanites imagine the ideal individual being — meaning they still relied on a whole lot of family, church, community, and guild — but they were self-sufficient enough to trust that as long as the government didn’t turn into a European monarchy or aristocracy, they wouldn’t have to worry too much about being all that more or less socially disadvantaged than the next guy (I’m saying ‘guy’ for a reason). This all changed during the second industrial revolution (latter 19th century) with the rise of the railroads, electrical engineering, scientific management, corporations, finance, and advertising — i.e., mass transportation, mass communication, mass production, and mass consumption. Suddenly, farmers and independent artisans were being displaced by factory workers, anxious consumers, political party machines, and corporate and financial kingpins. Social disparities skyrocketed and a hard day’s work was forever separated from a good day’s pay. One’s position and stability in society became far more confusing and confused; one’s charm, one’s capacity for trickery or salesmanship, one’s monied and/or status ambitions, one’s cutthroat disposition (or lack thereof), one’s mental or interpersonal talents, and of course one’s luck — all this came to matter more than one’s commonly understood “hard work” or “moral character.” (This partly explains why most suits today are widely considered to be “douchebags,” and most non-suits “salt of the earth”.) As this transition became more evident to the common man (again: mostly men we’re talking about), economists needed to find a way to justify the increasing disparities in wealth and income. In turn, they abandoned the just deserts argument (“no free lunch”) for the idea of “marginal utility.” What this meant was that wealth/income inequality was no longer explained on account of differences in effort. Instead, the issue now became one of usefulness. If the economists could prove that, say, a corporate owner or a financial speculator was more “useful” to society at large than, say, a worker on the factory floor, then they could resume with instituting a brand new infrastructure composed of massive corporations, advertising firms, law firms, and government bureaucracies — all favorable to the interests of those “new men” most inclined to succeed in the brave new world.

6. Now, I don’t want to fall into the trap of arguing that all these new developments benefited the capitalists (owners/financiers) and their enablers alone. They benefited everyone. Thanks to advanced technologies and public infrastructures that could have only emerged on the backs of such changes, people’s lives (in the aggregate) became more convenient, more healthy, and most of all, more exciting and expansive. No longer was the trajectory of one’s life confined to the borders of one’s town or the norms of one’s family, church, or guild. Just as life became more unpredictable, baffling, and unequal, so too did it allow for more dynamism and personality. While most Americans today presume that hyper-capitalism and conservatism go together just like tamed capitalism and liberalism, the relationship has always proven quite the opposite. The more “the free market” takes charge of everyday life — as opposed to the standards of family, church, guild, or government — the more cultural change (even cultural radicalism) you’ll see, to the point when community life itself, along with other forms of solidarity, become increasingly difficult to navigate and claim. It’s for this very reason the marriage between cultural conservatives and hyper-capitalists in America doesn’t make much intuitive sense. There are historical reasons why this marriage was formed, but I won’t get into them here. Google it.

7. The first big takeaway from all this is that the rise of corporate capitalism and consumer culture in the latter decades of the 19th century proved a mixed blessing for most and a disaster or a boon for those on the margins. And there’s no doubt it’s been great for loosening up overall cultural norms, especially gender and sexual norms. This bargain has persisted to the present day.

8. The second big takeaway is that, without the Knights of Labor, the Farmer’s Alliance, the populists, the socialists, the progressives, the Wobblies and other unionists, the muckraking journalists, and all the remaining groups and individuals who demanded that the new corporate and state makeup allow for some modicum of shared governance and profits, as well as some modicum of health and workplace standards, the mixed blessing we ended up with leading to the Great Depression would have amounted to something a lot more like a mixed curse.

9. The third big takeaway is that the Great Depression convinced nearly everyone that marginal economics (as then conceived) made sense up to a point, but also inhered a number of poisons when gulped in full. I’m not going to proceed to explain every single poison. There’s a lot of them and all you need to do is read you some John Maynard Keynes to learn what they are. (Again: Google it.) I’ll just say that it turned out that those getting paid the most in the wake of corporate laissez faire proved far less useful than the Marginalists originally imagined. Likewise, those paid less proved far more useful, especially as well-compensated consumers and healthy/educated citizens and neighbors. To put this another way, it turned out that the “marginal utility” of the capitalist owning class and the financial gambling class turned out to pale in comparison to the “marginal utility” of ensuring a robust and healthy working and middle class via welfare state reforms. In a final sense, the welfare state proved just as crucial (if not more crucial) to sustaining a healthy and growing republic than a “neoclassical” (i.e., marginalist) free market economics.

10. This fact became even more apparent in the postwar years, especially when you compare social indicators (even growth) from the welfare state heyday (1948-1973) to the neoliberal heyday (1973-PRESENT). And while the American story is extremely complicated, and a number of factors — other than just the rise of neoliberal market fundamentalism in the latter four decades — helps to explain why most social indicators went to shit in the shadow of Reagan, the correlative and causative evidence becomes all the more convincing once you look at the global landscape.

To put it mildly: those of us who are increasingly skeptical that the “free market” is a benevolent God — for whom we shall forever bow and trust without question or fail — are not skeptical because we’re hungry for a “free lunch.” We’re skeptical because history has left us with no other choice. To modify the famous quip from the neoconservative saint Irving Kristol, we’ve been mugged by history.

Categories: Culture, Domestic Politics, Political Economy, Global Affairs, Politics & Society

Tagged: Populist, Libertarian, Facebook, Workplace Democracy, Socialism, The Left, The Right, Capitalism, John Maynard Keynes, Democratic Culture, Individualism, United States Marine Corps, Community, Progressive, Consumerism, Finance, Science, Incarceration, Civil War, Inequality, Ayn Rand, Social Democracy, Welfare State, Labor, Ecological Sustainability, Bank of North Dakota, Mondragon Corporation, Evergreen Cooperatives, Civil Liberties, Free Lunch, Marginalism, Minimum Wage, Living Wage, Progressive Taxation, Entitlements, Social Investment, Deregulation, Happiness, Community Stabilization, David Tepper, John Paulson, Gilded Age, Second Industrial Revolution, Railroads, Electrical Engineering, Autonomy, Milton Friedman, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Scientific Management, Advertising, Personality, Character, Knights of Labor, Farmer's Alliance, Wobblies, Neoclassical Economics, Irving Kristol

You Can’t Have Civil Liberties Without Social Justice

rivercityblues

Posted on May 16, 2013

What da’ya know? The press corps is starting to rethink if President Obama is their knight in shining armor after all. Of course, it took a civil liberties violation involving its own people to drive them to said epiphany — a good four years into an administration that has regularly committed far more egregious violations against less important people. But it’s good news anyhow. Or at least it can be good news… if/when it spurs a serious conversation about the pitfalls of the corporate state. Here’s what such a conversation ought to entail:

1. How, regardless of who we elect, we’re going to see more civil liberties violations as long as we don’t begin demanding the (re)implementation of legal checks and balances;

2. How legal checks and balances will always be ignored, manipulated, or revoked as long as the nation’s (and the world’s) overall distribution of power and know-how remains so miserably lopsided;

3. How, no matter what a “tea party” conservative, libertarian, or Democratic politician tells you, distributions of power and know-how are forever entwined with distributions of wealth and income, which remain equally miserable;

4. How, therefore, any productive discussion about confronting unsettling political inequality and abuse requires an accompanying discussion about unsettling economic and social inequality and abuse;

5. How, given the number of our media conglomerates has dwindled from 50 to 6 since Reagan;

6. And how this scary development (among many others) can be almost entirely attributed to “deregulated” policies pushed by the likes of the very “tea party” conservatives, libertarians, and Democratic politicians who think (or suggest) they’re offering a reach-around for decentralization and freedom;

7. It will be very difficult for us to have these serious conversations — either about the simple (re)introduction of civil liberty checks and balances, or the inextricable linkage between power disparities and wealth disparities that provides for such gross civil liberty violations in the first place;

8. Unless, of course, those of us who know what’s up collectively mobilize, thus allowing for genuine alternatives to the present two-shaded menu of plutocracy. (FYI, there are peeps on the Right who also know what’s up.)

Anyway, mobilization begins with education. So pass along Glenn Greenwald’s latest. Hell, pass along the last ten-years-worth of Glenn Greenwald. The same goes for Matt Taibbi and the (lesser known) Peter Frase, or whoever else offers the most informed and eloquent answer to the hoodwinked and the powerless.

Categories: Culture, Domestic Politics, Global Affairs, Political Economy, Politics & Society, War

The War is Over

rivercityblues

Posted on May 14, 2013

This is the best reportage I’ve seen on the Afghanistan War, and quite frankly, it’s a shame something like this didn’t come out years ago. The reporter, Ben Anderson, is a hero in my book, as is Major Steuber, although I fear the latter will be punished for his candor. There are a number of other heroes in this film as well, and I ask that you not only find the time to watch all three parts, but go out of your way to share this with as many friends and family as possible. I’m certain the public relations machine — both in the military and ascending all the way up to the Oval Office — will be going haywire in the days and weeks ahead, but it is up to us the citizenry to see through (and call out) the PR bullshit once and for all.

A few more things that need to be said:

1. I know Musa Qala pretty well, my Marines got to know MQ and Sangin far better than I did, and I have little doubt most of us would agree with Anderson’s overall assessment.

2. Please take note of Anderson’s fleeting aside at the end about four Sangin Marines he worked with who committed suicide sometime after arriving stateside. Notwithstanding the reported (and unreported) death and destruction that takes place everyday in Afghanistan, a good chunk of the war’s tragedy returns home and walks among you. If you really want to support the troops, get these folks the help they deserve, or at the very least, allow them a space where they can feel safe and welcome to speak honestly about their experience. This begins with reading the news every once and awhile, and giving a shit.

3. While this is by far the best Afghanistan war reportage I know of, it still only captures a devastatingly small trace of the reality on the ground, especially when it comes to the reality of the Afghans… who, lo and behold, are as diverse and complex as any population. For more along these lines, see the new film, My Afghanistan.

4. I’ll conclude with this:

Categories: Culture, Global Affairs, Politics & Society, War

Tagged: Afghanistan, Ben Anderson, Major Steuber, Marines, Musa Qala, Sangin

“To Allude to Just a Few…”

rivercityblues

Posted on May 6, 2013

Here’s Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn praising the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) by way of full-throttle assault on its opposite. I love it:

…what makes IASC stand out so much for me, what makes it so distinctive, is its conscious guarding against much of what have been the dominant trends of modern academe as well as the larger intellectual climate of our times. To allude to just a few, these trends have included a kind of cv-oriented careerism, an unquestioned assumption that what academic life is about at its root is individual advancement and success conceived of in the narrowest possible terms of the present age, a partitioning of the pursuit of learning into separate fiefdoms with their own small-minded gatekeepers, an emphasis on quantity over quality, the abandonment of the humanistic and democratic aims of education for upscale vocational training for the privileged classes, stultifying bureaucratization and overweening administration, carelessness about style and form, forgetfulness about the public trust, the replacement of the contemplative and the search for meaning and excellence with the functional imperative and profit-seeking, posturing and back-biting in pursuit of personal status rather than collective engagement toward shared purposes, the bracketing of ethical or so-called “normative” concerns–once considered at the very heart of scholarship, teaching, and learning.

I’m just glad to be a candidate in a department that isn’t guilty as charged. I’m going to be politically incorrect and say our (relative) innocence is due (in part) to the fact that it’s still (however faintly) this man’s department…

Categories: Culture, Politics & Society

Tagged: Academia, Christopher Lasch, Democratic Culture, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Humanism, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, The Revolt of the Elites

one day

rivercityblues

Posted on April 25, 2013

one day i’ll get you to say

again what’s really on your chiseled

mind again.

i’ll get you to love my mind again.

i’ll get you to chisel my mind again.

one day i’ll get you to mind my love again.

i’ll get you to really love what you say again.

you’ll say what you love again.

Categories: Uncategorized

myrivercityblues

Just another WordPress.com site

“For the Republic”

rivercityblues

Posted on May 18, 2013

Work and Leisure

rivercityblues

Posted on May 18, 2013

The War is Over

rivercityblues

Posted on May 14, 2013

“To Allude to Just a Few…”

rivercityblues

Posted on May 6, 2013

one day

rivercityblues

Posted on April 25, 2013

Follow “myrivercityblues”