Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Egypt trying 19 U.S. NGO people

2012-02-07T07:52:00.000-08:00

For meddling with Egypt's internal affairs. Considering that this is the government that came from the Arab Spring that toppled Hosni Mubarek, perhaps we should listen to them.

Why people get upset about stuff shown on the Super Bowl halftime show

2012-02-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

I think it's simple: the Superbowl is one of the few times that most of the United States is watching the same program, as opposed to being stuck in their own media universe. You have the most retrograde folks who normally live under rocks watching it and more enlightened folks. When something that many people find perfectly normal is shown, folks for whom life is a nice little abstraction from reality are introduced to it, and they get upset. The outrage against Superbowl Halftime antics is truly the rebellion of the least common denominator in the U.S. awareness scale.

It seems I have a lot of readers in the Ukraine

2012-02-04T21:10:00.000-08:00

Which is strange because I didn't think that many folks there were sympathetic to the left, what with being forcibly included in the Soviet Union and being the subject of some of the most brutal Stalinist excesses, the forced collectivization culminating in the "Holodomor" or great famine. I'm taking the stats to mean that there are actual readers out there and not bots, or pissed off folks wondering how to take down the site.

But, welcome.

Interesting quote by Engels about Arabs

2012-02-02T10:36:00.002-08:00

Marx and Engels didn't share the same views about non-European nations, Marx being much more moderate. Engels expressed a fundamental contempt for peoples trying to obtain independence, and saw subject peoples as being better off absorbed by conquerers because they'd be incorporated into a higher economic civilization.

A few weeks ago I made reference to the non-understanding of the pair of political, cultural, and linguistic self determination by minorities within empires. I have to say that while the policy of the Soviet world in the second half of the 20th century promoting individual roads to Communism and socialism by Third World nations was flawed, it was a great advancement on the ideas that Engels, and unfortunately Marx himself to a lesser degree, put forward. Combining the protection of indigenous culture with socialist policies has much to recommend to it.

Here are Engels' thoughts about Algeria from 1848, admittedly at the start of his career. From The North Star, in an article about current events.

"Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the Arabian chief has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blamable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilisation. The piracies of the Barbaresque states, never interfered with by the English government as long as they did not disturb their ships, could not be put down but by the conquest of one of these states. And the conquest of Algeria has already forced the Beys of Tunis and Tripoli, and even the Emperor of Morocco, to enter upon the road of civilisation. They were obliged to find other employment for their people than piracy, and other means of filling their exchequer than tributes paid to them by the smaller states of Europe. And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers, — whose principal means of living consisted of making excursions either upon each other, or upon the settled villagers, taking what they found, slaughtering all those who resisted, and selling the remaining prisoners as slaves. All these nations of free barbarians look very proud, noble and glorious at a distance, but only come near them and you will find that they, as well as the more civilised nations, are ruled by the lust of gain, and only employ ruder and more cruel means. And after all, the modern bourgeois, with civilisation, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong."

I have to say that Marx showed great sympathy to people in the Third World, but saw the problems as ultimately manifesting in material oppression. Material oppression was what was really at the bottom of the other sorts of oppression claimed. That is more of a philosophical distinction in analysis than a discounting of the oppression itself, which Engels appears to have done.

Jihad and McWorld, or, globalization and 9/11

2012-02-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

A taboo subject. Remembering Benjamin Barber's great book "Jihad vs. McWorld", the attacks of 9/11 can be interpreted as a response not just to western intervention in Saudi Arabia and Israel but to westernizing capitalist globalization as well. That this response took the form of fundamentalist Islam is somewhat predictable, as socialism sponsored by the Soviet Union had collapsed and independent socialist ideologies had not been able to coalesce. It's possible that the plotters of 9/11 were responding to an erosion of their unique cultural and social worldview. The link between fundamentalist Islam and the the positively medieval interpretation of life put forward by Bin Laden and company added another unfortunate dimension that diverted attention away from the actions of the United States and the global capitalist culture. If it was the first act of total aggression in the globalized world, it was also the globalized world's undoing, as the response of the U.S. systematically shredded any allegiance to any global standard of conduct and to any universal notion of human culture and society.

9/11 was, of course, very very wrong. Not only that, but fundamentalist Islam is a barren ideology compared to varieties of Islamic influenced socialism based on Third World Nationalism. Hiding out in the wilds of Saudi Arabia, where any primitive notion is allowed to flourish without hindrance because of the constant flow of oil money, and where those in charge are able to indulge whatever bullshit they want, and linking up similar backwards regimes in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Sudan, without much oil money, and looking at them as the promised lands, as places where pure values of some kind still live, is insane.

Hitler and an aspect of demagoguery not paid attention to in the U.S.: the soldier angle

2012-02-01T10:25:00.004-08:00

Which is to say that when Hitler was being marketed to the German people his service in World War I was played to the hilt. According to the propaganda, Hitler was a perfect representative of the Frontsoldaten, the Front Soldiers who came back and found themselves unable to reintegrate into society, who believed that the German change of regime was due to a stab in the back by the German high command. The messianic overtones expressed by people like Dietrich Eckart, his sponsor in the Nazi Party, with him being the one they'd been looking for, were references to his front service, to his supposed bravery and heroism, as much as to his rabid anti-semitism.

We know now that Hitler was nothing like that, that his actual background was very strange to say the least and not exemplary of German or Austrian society, but it twenty twenty hindsight is great, especially if you're in a country that did not experience the event. Many people in the day commented on Hitler's being unremarkable, a non-distinguished presence,and a non-entity, but this was turned by the propaganda machine into his being one of the people. Beware of men and women in uniform who present themselves as being all American, as being the embodiment of American patriotism.

*on edit: about the stage management, and being used as a tool by others, Hitler was involved as a player political machinations before Eckart came into the picture. His assignment to spy on the Nazi party when he was in the military wasn't spying in the traditional sense of the term. It was done under a large group within the German military headed by General Erich Ludendorff that wanted to promote right wing nationalism.

Palin the literary theorist: Rawstory: Romney created ‘false narrative’ to win Florida

2012-02-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

Here

Expect her to start tweeting about the ambiguity of governing narratives in today's society.

“I think that with $17 million purchasing some ads and some false narrative it was very, very difficult for Newt Gingrich and the other candidates to counter that bombardment of advertisements,” the former Republican vice presidential candidate told Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

“$17 million spent in one state, that purchased a lot of darts and arrows that were flown in one direction and then a lot of darts and arrows were flown back and you know a lot of that negativity sure didn’t paint the party and the cause in very attractive colors,” she added. “I think that hurts the electorate and ultimately diminishes the energy necessary to move forward in the general election.”

Speaking ex cathedra, a revolution in the U.S. needs to be both socialist and based on race and ethnicity

2012-01-30T21:37:00.000-08:00

Because racial oppression can't be collapsed fully into socialism and class oppression can't be fully collapsed into racial oppression. The two need to co-exist for real change to happen, without one over-ruling the other.

A Kantian argument against nihilistic skepticism

2012-01-30T16:05:00.001-08:00

Strange, because Kant is popularly associated with the "Thing in Itself", when he's associated with anything at all. On its surface the "Thing in Itself" is a very nihilistic concept. Kant believed that we can't perceive things in themselves but can only perceive processed appearances filtered through our mental machinery. Scientific equipment only helps partially, because human operators interpret the information through their own conceptual filters. It seems like we're pretty much stuck when trying to gain definitive knowledge of the world, right? I mean, we can't ever say that we've really gotten to what's truly behind things.

Well, not quite.

You see, one Kant's great insights, incorporated into all his philosophy, was that we ourselves are objects, and we possess consciousness, and because of this we can have insight into one Thing in Itself: our own. This can be done through self examination of psychological experience. Based on this fact, we can extrapolate that whatever's out there behind the things in themselves comes from the same root as human experience, human psychology, and human bodies. This is important because it means that, while not decisively knowable, some knowledge of the true nature of the world can be gotten by generalized analogy with interior human experience. We know that while the world may appear strange and different from us, much of it is natural, organic and living, and so probably shares similar characteristics with us to one degree or another. We can also surmise that life, or what we consider to be life, share's basic characteristics.

Kant's notion of personhood has been used by Tom Regan and others to justify animal rights based on similarities in psychology, but while these uses are perfectly valid, the concept can go much deeper. We have a personhood that entreats us to do unto others like ourselves based on our own experience of being human, but we also have primate hood, mammal hood, animal hood, as well as other hoods. As part of the components of nature, we potentially have insights into them that scientific observation might not be able to easily get to, the emotional experience of animals, for instance.

All of this matters quite a bit for philosophy, because philosophy is based on generalizations and the ability to make accurate generalizations that are connected to some sort of reality principle.

This possibility is what prompted later German idealist philosophers like Schelling and Schlegal to go towards a Naturphilosophie emphasizing nature as the ground of life and the start of philosophy, as well as towards Spinoza's concept of God as substance and all visible objects as variations on it, especially human beings. Significantly, according to Besier, these philosophers kept Spinoza's mode of thought close together with a subjective idealism presupposing radical self knowledge, because that was the surest way to get philosophical knowledge of the world. The position implies great freedom and autonomy for the individual within a somewhat determined schema, and prefigured much 19th century philosophy that integrated individual action within a structured social context that influences but does not determine it. In other words, in it's own way the Naturphilosophie was the forerunner of sociology, Marxism, and socialism in general, although Marx substituted economy for nature.

Tyranny of the Majority? Occupy Seattle

2012-01-26T13:24:00.000-08:00

Read the piece about the proposal to go to consensus decision making at the General Assembly because of the supposed "Tyranny of the Majority". This is confusing, because if you're really doing consensus it's almost impossible with a very large group. But there's a possibility that what's being advocated is something called 'consensus' that actually involves folks who can't get a majority getting their way. If so, and, actually, even if not so, it's ironic that people in a group that says it represents the 99% are complaining about the Tyranny of the Majority.

Let Gingrich become King of the Moon

2012-01-26T10:37:00.002-08:00

There'd be little harm there, at least in the short term....re: Gingrich's advocacy of a Moon Base.

The difference between a Soviet style collective economy and a cooperative, communal, one

2012-01-25T12:15:00.000-08:00

Although I'm no scholar of the Soviet economy, based on what I've read my impression is that it resembled a series of big box stores and corporations. Instead of locally controlled, cooperative, stores, you had a few large, generic ones whose mode of operation was dictated from above, and who sold a small number of mostly generic, standardized goods. At one time some Eastern Bloc countries didn't even have restaurants, bars, or cafes, but only collective cafeterias and dining halls owned by workers' organizations. I bet the situation was the same in Soviet Union. Farms weren't run or defined by people who had worked the land for centuries in a communal, cooperative, way, but by guidance from central tractor/fertilizer/technology stations who ran the farms like agribusiness. I'm not sure how the factories were themselves organized, or who had the power, but my understanding is that they were monolithic, megalithic, and non-competitive--except when they needed to fulfill the requirements of the plan.

A better way to organize things would be to have a communal, community controlled economy, also directed by a greater plan, but run cooperatively. The stores and factories would be owned by society as a whole, but would be decentralized and would compete with each other in a heavily regulated way. Anarchy, Left Libertarianism, Left Marxism, lend themselves to a limited market if it's kept in check, which is why the Right wingers have tried to co-opt it. In fact, Individualist Anarchists often talk about a simultaneously socialist and market based system being possible.

...and Obama gives a good State of the Union address

2012-01-24T21:56:00.001-08:00

Thumbs up from here.

Kim Jong Un, China, Stalin: Autocracy is always easier than messy democracy

2012-01-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

Which is why so many countries have reverted to it. Stalin cast himself as the Red Tsar, although he never used the term, playing up the memes that tsarist autocracy had used for several hundred years, presumably in order to 'build socialism'. Mao became the Emperor, and the Chinese leadership collectively assumed the role of the Imperial bureaucracy. Bruce Cummings commented in an interview on Democracy Now! in December that a very minor Soviet official gave him his opinion that Kim Il Sung's son would replace him, and that his grandson would follow in turn, presumably based on the idea that North Koreans had never experienced democracy and so were treating rule by a dictator as just another monarch. This style of leadership has to be the biggest cop out of all, where leaders eliminate democracy and promote the cult of the autocrat in order to more easily get things done. They inevitably say it's populism, but it's nothing of the sort.

Romantic Socialism, Marxist Materialism, Modernism

2012-01-20T16:56:00.002-08:00

Piggybacking on the post complaining about strange things Americans believe.

To me, Marx's belief that real socialism incorporates a materialism that disdains everything that's not concrete is a mistake that doesn't reflect the origins of the socialist movement. If you look at early socialists like Fourier, Proudhon, and Louis Blanc, their ideas contain reactions against French materialism combined with an ideal of social justice formed by criticism of free market Enlightenment thought. Not everyone shared Marx's opinion that bourgeois society was progressive because it created a new, rational, order.

Early socialist thinkers were sympathetic to the goals and ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, but they didn't believe that materialism was sufficient to guarantee a good life and a just society. Life was more complicated than atoms bumping into each other, and the idea that human life resembled the interaction of billiard balls devalued the human condition and mowed down the ambiguities and subtleties inherent in life.

In fact, to assert that the Social, that society, is real and important in a non-rhetorical sense was to reject a key notion of materialist philosophy: the ultimate self sufficiency and autonomy of the individual. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, for instance, John Locke, denied the idea that the Social and Society are valid categories in and of themselves. Because of this, and their criticism of materialism, the early socialists were a type of Romantic, and are sometimes referred to as Romantic socialists. Like the Romantics they wanted to re-orient the world to what was not immediately tangible, philosophy notwithstanding. In the socialists' case they focused on social relationships instead of subjective experience.

As a reflection of their skepticism about materialist individualism, the early Romantic socialists were also in harmony with liberal nationalism. Liberal nationalists were not reactionary but wanted to assert their autonomy and cultural uniqueness in the face of non-democratic mono-cultural regimes. Isaiah Berlin argues in "The Roots of Romanticism" that they emerged in opposition to Napoleon's exportation of the French enlightenment across Europe, but a different perspective is that it was formed by peoples who benefited under Napoleon who now faced their old, undemocratic, mono-cultural oppressors. The original nationalists in countries such as Poland, Italy, and Hungary agreed with liberal principles, but wanted to implement them in their own way, and retain their own language and culture. The Romantic socialists and the liberal nationalists were the main progressive force in Europe from the turn of the 19th century to the years after 1848.

While Romanticism lead to Wagnerian excess and reaction, to a rancid organicism and ultra-conservative, exclusionary nationalism, that was a later development. Reaction set in when it happened, and the Romantics adopted more and more outlandish views, hardening from liberals to conservatives.

Modernism was not a simple return to Enlightenment values but a restatement of them within a context opened up by Romantic and Idealist criticism. Monistic materialism, for instance, the official doctrine of the Bolshevik party from Plekhanov on, was decidedly unlike classical materialism. It recognized social relationships and that society was more than just a collection of individuals, but it differed from organicist Romanticism in rejecting the idea that society is like a body with different social groups functioning like organs, and that it was in some sense 'alive'. Unfortunately, the socialists of the early 20th century outside of Russia who were dogmatically Marxist either forgot or never learned this.

Despite being active during the height of Romantic socialism, Marx only found his ideological home after the reaction against Romanticism took over. Marx heavily criticized the Romantics, but his criticism preceded the reaction by many years, and was formulated at the height of the movement in documents like the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848. To me, Marx fundamentally misunderstood the positions of the people he criticized and naively sought to turn back the clock to the French Revolution in a post-Hegelian setting. It should be noted that many of the people whom Marx condemned in the Manifesto, like Proudhon and the Fourieristes, had important followings while Marx was still just a journalist. His thought resonated with the Modernist critics of Romanticism, but depended on Hegelian principles that they themselves would come to criticize. Nevertheless, it provided grist for the mill for the less thoughtful in the socialist movement.

By reasserting Enlightenment values in an unthinking manner, these socialists fueled critics who saw the whole movement as crude, absurd, and stupid. After all, the ideas had been criticized for a hundred years ad nauseum, and were now being put forward again as if nothing happened. Despite the subtleties of Modernist philosophy, critics saw the same old problems lurking under the surface, and were afraid that a stupidly Modernist materialism would produce a greater destruction of social life than Enlightenment materialism itself. But the crudeness and insensitivity to aspects of life not reducible to atomic theory by these people was not only unnecessary to socialism but was in some ways counter to the impulses that started it.

I think it's possible for socialism to take the framework of the Modernist context, combine it with a changed Romanticism-- perhaps influenced by the Surrealist project of reinventing the world (a classic Romantic concept in a Modernist framework), and combine all of it with a post-modern sensibility to produce a socialism that meets the needs of the head, the heart, and the body without doing an injustice to any of them.

*on edit: here's an interesting take on Pan-Slavism from Engels in 1849, the year after the Manifesto was published. At the time, the tendency wasn't reactionary, and similar movements had been founded for Italian and German unity.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung February 1849

"We repeat: apart from the Poles, the Russians, and at most the Turkish Slavs, no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for independence and viability.

Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which from the time when they achieved the first, most elementary stage of civilization already came under foreign sway, or which were forced to attain the first stage of civilization only by means of a foreign yoke, are not viable and will never be able to achieve any kind of independence.

And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. The Czechs, among whom we would include the Moravians and Slovaks, although they differ in respect of language and history, have never had a history of their own. Bohemia has been chained to Germany since the time of Charles the Great. The Czech nation freed itself momentarily and formed the Great-Moravian state, only immediately to come under subjugation again and for 500 years to be a bill thrown from one to another by Germany, Hungary and Poland. Following that, Bohemia and Moravia passed definitely to Germany and the Slovak regions remained with Hungary. And this historically absolutely non-existent "nation" puts forward claims to independence? "

Following up on the Gingrich 'open marriage' stuff...blowjobs 'not sex'

2012-01-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

According to a Gingrich mistress. From the Village Voice:

"If you believe Newt Gingrich's former mistress Anne Manning, the Speaker has for decades relied on the blowjob as the sex act with built-in plausible deniability. Referring to her first date in 1977 with Gingrich, Manning told Vanity Fair in 1995: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her."'

If there's a connection between linguistics and other sets of symbol systems

2012-01-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

Such as Structuralism claims. If social life can successfully be analyzed semiotically, it may be because linguistic perception spills over into other areas of social life. Kant identified several modes of thought used by the mind in interacting with society and nature, that he called different kinds of reason. For example practical reason, which is practical knowledge about how to do things as opposed to analytic knowledge about what a thing is. It's conceivable that we use a unique way of organizing experience, a linguistic reason, that has its own rules and logic, when we talk to each other or tell stories. It's also possible that individuals unconsciously treat social products like they do symbols in an oral story. Repeated interactions over time with products by many individuals could produce complex symbol systems that appeared to be organized like a language. This would explain how structral systems can proliferate outside of a direct linguistic context.

A structural system would be the outcome of the mediation of members with products made by society or by nature, whether they're fashionable clothing, health products, or hot books. Preferences would be organized using rules implicit in the linguistic mode of perception as a secondary level of organization. The primary mode would relate to the main purpose of what's being looked at. For example, food's main purpose is to supply energy, but on a secondary level there are preferences that are less tied to nutrition than they are to social and cultural phenomenon. All this of course, presumes that belief systems, fashion, and other symbol systems really do organize themselves in a linguistic way, which is a huge 'but'.

If true, it would also mean that the conflict between structuralism and post-structuralism is irrelevant, because neither has a claim to reality, both being reducible to biological response. Deconstruction would simply point to the ambiguity of philosophical anthropology instead of to a complete, absolute crisis, in truth.

American obscurantism the result of unchallenged economic dominance

2012-01-18T20:23:00.001-08:00

Have written about this before, but unfortunately can't find the post.

I think one of the reasons that very strange beliefs like Creationism, Birtherism, and New World Order/ Federal Reserve conspiracies exist in the United States is that we've had it too easy economically. In the post World War II world the competition had literally been bombed into ruins, and we walked in and filled the economic void with whatever we made. Although the '60s and '70s saw higher education greatly expand to create a highly skilled workforce, the efforts focused on future white collar workers, not on everyone down the line in every community, although some teachers tried valiantly to bring good education to everyone.

There wasn't any particular need beyond general principle for everyone to have an up to date education. The U.S. school system, locally controlled to an extreme, also resisted change. During the economic golden age of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, you could get a job without much education. Because of this, in the U.S. peculiar ideas that withered when confronted with critical reasoning weren't challenged, while in other countries all citizens got a good education, because they knew that an educated workforce is necessary to compete globally.

Now, with our economy in a bad state and the results of off-shoring industry written on the wall, we're seeing the consequences of lax education come to the surface. We're seeing how many people live in a bubble of half truths about how the world works, and we'll find as time goes on that Ron Paul fantasies about conspirators aren't what's needed for a high tech manufacturing economy. The way out is reason.

Question of the Day:

2012-01-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

If hard scientists like Richard Dawkins can talk about Sociology, does that mean that Sociologists can now talk about hard science? Enquiring minds want to know, because I can talk about DNA all day, no matter that I've never really studied it.

The need to combine an analysis of race with class, the example of England

2012-01-16T19:32:00.001-08:00

Not only does class effect everyone in society, but class is also the future. If, and it's a very big if, individual and institutional racism are somehow lessened, we'll likely find ourselves in a society where there are still large unequal divisions between different classes of people, only the two classes will be made up of people of all colors. Simply eliminating outright barriers to participation doesn't solve society's problems. A great test case is England.

England in the 19th century up to World War II was a very homogenous society. There were Irish, Scot, and Welsh migrants, but that was about it. The big conflicts in American society around race were absent. Yet huge, obscene, inequality existed, and was bolstered by stiff upper lip self help ideology, in the best bourgeois tradition. Self help didn't change anything, even though society was supposed to reward those who worked hard. Instead of self help succeeding, England gave birth to the militant labor movement, and while it didn't press for revolution as strongly as continental socialist movements, it was still as tough as they come. Eventually it formed the Labour party, and after World War II the Labour party took over and created a welfare state in the birthplace of self-help.

England represents the future of America. It is what America will face if outright barriers of racism and ethnic prejudice are dissolved. Not only that, but the same structures leading to the birth of pure class politics manipulate racism and ethnic prejudice to serve them better today.

Capitalist Aristocracy, revised

2012-01-15T19:21:00.001-08:00

From Here. It's a lot more breezy than I like, but since it use to be the first link on my links page I thought it should be raised up a little bit quality wise. Basic idea is that inequality is an intentional fact in our society stemming from the social philosophy of the Federalist Party.

Something just clicked in my mind.
Facts that have been floating around in there, without making sense, suddenly have become clear.

Why is political and social reform so hard in the United States? The answer, at least partially, is because our social system is a semi-decentralized capitalist aristocracy.

Every town, every city, in the United States has it's political machine, and that machine is inevitably connected with the more prominent and wealthier members of the community. They're the ones who run for office and get elected.

They compose the power elite, per C. Wright Mills.

Over and over they're the ones who become the rulers, and it's just normal business. One has to either look at this and say that American life is extraordinarily corrupt on all levels, in every town, or say that this corruption is really a normal and intentional part of our social system.

I think the latter.

The social system envisioned by the Federalist Party, who framed the Constitution, was a blend of theories stating that only the better people should rule with ideas about free market economics that were relatively modern for their time, and its ideal was a society where commerce would flourish yet give rise to a stratified society where prominent people in business would rule towns and counties like the aristocracy in England.

Political power on the local level, on the State level, and on the federal level, isn't looked at by the machines as something open and abstract in and of itself, as something that can be fought over in an classical, open political arena. It's looked at as a thing people are entitled to because of their stature. In fact, high schools and colleges are oriented towards integrating young up and comers into the elite social strata. Half of the programs out there in colleges, making up all the business related programs as well as politics, are there to ensure that the right people make their way up the social ladder. We have a formal political system, but it's undermined by the socio-cultural world feeding people into the system.

America hasn't quite had a truly democratic revolution yet. Rather, we did, then we had a counter-revolution that overthrew it. We still exist in a nether world between true democracy and artistocratic rule.

When you start talking about taking on the system, you need to take on the entrenched power that fuels the machines, because this is the level where the real decisions are made...unlike formal politics, which for Americans is largely a fleeting pastime, especially at the local and state levels.

If we want true political reform we'll have to have true social reform as well, or else we'll end up with just another shadow show.

Re-vised Re-post: The King of the Rednecks

2012-01-15T18:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, American political life is like a contest where you wait to see just what kind of stupid, inbred, ignorant, throwback to long long ago, spewing the inanest garbage possible, will come out on the field. Can we find the ur-hick, the long lost King of the Rednecks, whose family tree goes in circles, who has been kept pure, outside of modern civilization for so long that we can barely understand his speech, to say nothing of his thought processes? If we can, we may make him President.

"Why is Europe a dirty word?" by Nicholas Kristof

2012-01-15T18:36:00.001-08:00

Here. I usually don't like Kristof, but he's nailed it:

"It’s a languid morning in Peoria, as a husband and wife are having breakfast. “You’re sure you don’t want eggs and bacon?” the wife asks. “Oh, no, I prefer these croissants,” the husband replies. “They have a lovely je ne sais quoi.”

He dips the croissant into his café au-lait and chews it with zest. “What do you want to do this evening?” he asks. “Now that we’re only working 35 hours a week, we have so much more time. You want to go to the new Bond film?”

***

But the basic notion of Europe as a failure is a dangerous misconception. The reality is far more complicated.

What is true is that Europe is in an economic mess. Quite aside from the current economic crisis, labor laws are often too rigid, and the effect has been to make companies reluctant to hire in the first place. Unemployment rates therefore are stubbornly high, especially for the young. And Europe’s welfare state has been too generous, creating long-term budget problems as baby boomers retire.

“The dirty little secret of European governments was that we lived in a way we couldn’t afford,” Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director of the newspaper Le Monde, told me. “We lived beyond our means. We can’t live this lie anymore.”

Yet Kauffmann also notes that Europeans aren’t questioning the basic European model of safety nets, and are aghast that Americans tolerate the way bad luck sometimes leaves families homeless.

It’s absurd to dismiss Europe. After all, Norway is richer per capita than the United States. Moreover, according to figures from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, per-capita G.N.P. in France was 64 percent of the American figure in 1960. That rose to 73 percent by 2010. Zut alors! The socialists gained on us!"

To which I could add: European welfare state vs. Wal-Mart, obesity, and Nascar, along with creationism and fantasies about the Federal Reserve.

The notion that Utopia will spontaneously manifest: a dissenting view from the West Coast

2012-01-14T16:52:00.000-08:00

The concept of natural self organization had quite a few test runs on the West Coast through the scores of towns formed from nothing by western migration. Unlike the Plains, once the Native Americans were destroyed, the fertile land of the West Coast was amenable to a high standard of living, giving it a paradisal aura. What did these spontaneously organized economic and cultural experiments and demonstrations of paradise in action, of the and the American Dream realized, create?

Well, if their descendants in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are any guide, they created prosperous, rabidly conservative, xenophobic societies. The West Coast's dirty little secret is that in the Northwest and California the settlers who preceded the later industry fueled migration created some of the most reactionary towns in the country. Medford in southern Oregon, a first wave timber town, was famous as a sundown town where black folks weren't welcome after dark. Joan Didion's Sacramento portrayed in "Notes of a Native Daughter" was hostile to outsiders in the extreme, not even tolerating people from Texas, although she indicated no racism.

This suggests that simply leaving folks to their own devices does not guarantee a just, inclusive, society. The very prosperity of the towns contributed to their xenophobic character. Folks are probably just as likely to create an ultra-conservative society as they are a left-wing one.

One can generalize from this to the "Heartland" as well.

Marx's Capital--based on the idea of Rent from David Ricardo

2012-01-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

Marx's idea of capital is based on David Ricardo's idea of rent on land. Rent is possible because titled possession to a scarce piece of property allows the owners to extract money from tenants. Because businesses own the machines and the facilities that workers use, they have an unequal amount of power and use it to extract the equivalent of rent from workers. It's value they take just because they can, over and above the market level wage.

This initial advantage of businesses over workers allows them to accumulate large amounts of capital over time, intensifying the differences in power. The collection of corporations and businesses forms the capitalist system, where possession of capital, jobs on the side of capital, and business ownership leads to the creation of an upper class.
Correspondingly, the of people who as individuals find themselves at the mercy of capital form the working class.

I'm not an economist, by the way.