After being informed by a compassionate [...]]]> In March of 2009, my friend Amelia Opalinska and I hitchhiked around Colombia. Despite our parents’ conviction that such behavior was conducive to immediate kidnapping by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the greatest challenge we ultimately faced was the reluctance of motorists to pick us up.

After being informed by a compassionate passerby that this reluctance was probably a result of recent robbery schemes involving female hitchhikers, we attempted to render our appearance as innocuous as possible by designing colorful placards to indicate our intended destination and decorating them with rainbows and flowers. When this did not work, we drew stop signs in red marker and positioned ourselves in the middle of the road, which only caused vehicles to swerve around us.

Appeals to police at anti-narcotics checkpoints for assistance in procuring rides meanwhile proved even less effective, as citizens appeared unconvinced that the representatives of the state had their well-being at heart.

The FARC can’t dance

Amelia and I eventually arrived to the department of Putumayo in southern Colombia, where our activities included attending a dance at an outdoor pavilion in the village of Umbria. Decorative signage in the village consisted of USAID advertisements reminding the population not to grow coca and fliers distributed by the Águilas Negras (Black Eagles) threatening to kill prostitutes and anyone else who went outside after 10 PM. The Águilas Negras are the successor group to the superficially demobilized paramilitary organization the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), historical partner of the Colombian state.

We first learned of the fliers from Milber, an 18-year-old former FARC conscript and dance attendee who had recently returned to Umbria after a four-year stint in the jungle. Although quick to blame the FARC for his unfamiliarity with popular dance forms—as well as for the heartache suffered by his mother, who had witnessed her son’s removal from the family residence at gunpoint—Milber harbored no illusions as to the imperial utility of casting the guerrilla outfit in the role of narco-terrorist enemy. Drawing parallels with other resource-rich regions of the world, he reasoned that Saddam Hussein had also served as a useful menace and facilitator of U.S. corporate profit.

Indeed, in an important new book entitled Cocaine, death squads, and the war on terror: U.S. imperialism and class struggle in Colombia, scholars Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle expose the sinister motivations behind—and manifestations of—the “U.S. war on drugs and terror” in Colombia.

Refuting USAID’s seemingly charitable concern for the cultivation of morally upstanding crops, the authors provide a succinct but detailed history of the United States’ alliances with drug traffickers and paramilitaries and its contributions to Colombian state repression and the institutionalization of the cocaine industry. Notable beneficiaries of the malevolent nexus have included Lockheed Martin and DynCorp, a private mercenary firm which Villar and Cottle note “is the same private company that the Reagan-Bush administration used to run arms and drugs during the cocaine decade [of the 1980s].”

Projecting narco-terror

The book’s argument that “[t]he war on drugs and terror in Colombia is in fact a war for the control of the cocaine trade—in a system of imperial domination—by means of state-sponsored terror” is summarized in the conclusion as follows: “This war as decreed by successive Washington administrations was, is, and remains its opposites: a war for drugs and a war of terror.”

Of course, such assessments are not easily grafted onto the consciousness of a populace conditioned to impute noble—or at least sincere and non-paradoxical—motives to U.S. projects abroad. If the U.S. is to attain the minimum amount of self-awareness necessary for any society that considers itself free, the proliferation of studies like Villar and Cottle’s is a prerequisite.

The scholars explain that, starting in the late 1980s, “the Colombian state commenced efforts to manufacture its image as a defender of democracy at war with narco-terrorists,” enlisting the talents of U.S. public relations firm the Sawyer/Miller Group. The firm earned nearly a million dollars in the first six months of 1991 for its efforts, which included “us[ing] the American press to disseminate Colombian government propaganda, with the routine production of pamphlets, letters to editors signed by Colombian officials, and advertisements placed in the New York Times and Washington Post.”

As tends to happen with even the most diligently manufactured threats, however, the traitorous truth has consistently failed to rise to the occasion, and “in 2001 Colombian intelligence estimated that [the] FARC controlled less than 2.5 percent of Colombia’s cocaine exports, while the AUC controlled 40 percent, not counting the narco-bourgeoisie [the updated incarnation of the Colombian oligarchy] as a whole.”

The exclusive assignment of the “terrorist” label to the FARC is meanwhile not entirely congruent with the fact that it was the Colombian military and not the guerrillas that resuscitated the Vietnam-era collective punishment method of “draining the sea to kill the fish.” According to Villar and Cottle, “[h]uman rights groups contend that the AUC and Colombian armed forces have been responsible for approximately 90 to 95 percent of all politically-motivated killings, which have included massacres by chainsaw and other methods designed to terrorize the campesinos in rural areas under FARC control.”

As for the U.S. request in the 1980s for the extradition of Medellín cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar for “conspiring to introduce cocaine into the United States via Nicaragua,” this allegation might have just as aptly been levied against other characters such as U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, whose activity did not result in a collaborative assassination effort by the CIA, AUC, Cali Cartel, and Colombian police.

You cannot mention Monsanto!

When Amelia and I met Milber in 2009, his parents had just acquired a coca plot after failing to make ends meet with less lucrative crops. Other farming families in the area described additional obstacles to diversifying away from coca, such as repeated U.S.-sponsored aerial fumigation of sugar cane, banana, and corn crops. Fumigated children, livestock, and water supplies were also reported.

Journalist Jeremy Bigwood has investigated the toxic effects of fumigation for CorpWatch, drawing attention to a revealing episode in 2001 in which a recalcitrant U.S. senator—who had criticized military aid to Colombia and the dangerous inaccuracy of fumigation—was hauled down to the South American nation for an honorary cropduster flyover that was intended to negate his concerns.

Bigwood quotes the senator’s spokesman on the resulting spectacle: “On the very first flyover by the cropduster, the U.S. Senator, the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, the Lieutenant Colonel of the Colombian National Police, and other Embassy and congressional staffers were fully doused—drenched, in fact”—with the herbicide Roundup, a product of the U.S.-based biotech giant Monsanto, former manufacturer of the infamous defoliant Agent Orange.

Remarking on the relevance of the Agent Orange legacy given the deforestation of large sections of Vietnam, the “over 50,000 birth defects and hundreds of thousands of cancers both in Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, as well as in former U.S. troops serving in South East Asia”, and the similarity in post-contact symptoms between victims of Agent Orange and Roundup, Bigwood notes that the lack of transparency with regard to Monsanto’s machinations in Colombia is entirely logical: “[D]uring a meeting with U.S. Embassy staff in Bogotá, the top officer at the State Department’s Narcotics Affairs Section was emphatic and his tone threatening: ‘You cannot mention Monsanto!’ he boomed, spit flying from his mouth.”

Villar and Cottle meanwhile allude to the helpfulness of fumigation policies in “draining the sea”, and emphasize—with regard to Fusarium oxysporum, a fungus whose appeal to proponents of Washington’s multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia presumably had something to do with its success in wiping out a coca plantation in Hawaii in the 1970s—that “the mono-crop drug fincas of the narco-bourgeoisie in Colombia were not sprayed. The fungal spraying was proposed only for the rebel-held areas.”

Addicted to narco-imperialism

As Peter Dale Scott asserts in his excellent foreword to Cocaine, death squads, and the war on terror, the book “shows how in the last half-century the United States has helped to centralize and militarize the class conflict [in Colombia], and above all how cocaine has come to play a central role in financing this oppression.”

Villar and Cottle write:

The cocaine decade saw the consolidation of the Colombian drug trade as a source of profit for U.S. capital via banks that were established to launder and invest drug money in legitimate U.S. corporations. The United States contended it was at war with drugs and terrorists in Colombia, but, in reality, the economic relations between U.S. imperialism and the Colombian narco-bourgeoisie permitted cocaine production to flourish in Colombia, and the cocaine market to expand within the United States and Western Europe.

The authors stress that, though Colombian paramilitary death squads may not constitute a “proxy army for the United States,” they do “function… as a vanguard force of the counterinsurgency strategy” in eliminating obstacles to foreign investment, corporate exploitation of resources, and the continuing economic preponderance of the Colombian elite. These obstacles come in a variety of forms, among them campesinos, human rights workers, journalists, trade unionists, and indigenous citizens maliciously inhabiting resource-rich land.

The AUC, for its part, happens to inhabit the same list of U.S. State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations as Al Qaeda, but one suspects that a more substantive uproar would have been made over the discovery that Chiquita Brands International was funneling millions of dollars to the latter group.

The need for a paramilitary proxy army in the first place is meanwhile called into question by the behavior of the Colombian army itself, recipient of large quantities of U.S. military aid and renowned for its expertise in slaughtering civilians and dressing the corpses up like FARC guerrillas. As for even more direct U.S. contributions to violence and oppression in Colombia, Villar and Cottle note that, when the administration of former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez “stepped up its civil war preparations in 2002, the U.S. government demanded cooperation in shielding U.S. forces stationed in-country from prosecution for war crimes.”

Prior to being hailed in the U.S. as a democratic hero and role model for Latin America on account of his neoliberal enthusiasm for societal repression, Uribe’s claims to fame included appearing on a 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency list of the More Important Colombian Narco-Traffickers and Narco-Terrorists.

Blood and capital accumulation

Cocaine, death squads, and the war on terror is a vital antidote to the fatuous propaganda that functions as mainstream news on Colombia.

In tracing the history of the relationship between imperial America and “its most important client state on the continent,” Villar and Cottle demonstrate that the emergence of the FARC was a direct result of social inequality and CIA-backed class repression. Prospects for conflict resolution thus appear dim given the authors’ note that “Colombia is the only major country in Latin America where the gap between the rich and poor has markedly widened in recent years, according to the UN Commission on Latin America.”

Colombian President Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958-1962) may have put it best himself when he commented—in reference to the devastating U.S.-assisted counterinsurgency campaign that followed the assassination of Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who had “promised to end the rule of the landed oligarchy and eliminate mass poverty”—that “blood and capital accumulation went together.”

In conclusion, it is worthwhile to recall the following passage from Glenn Greenwald’s piece “The Wars on Drugs and Terror: mirror images,” which underscores the rhetoric of Villar and Cottle:

It’s the perfect deceit. These wars, in an endless loop, sustain and strengthen the very menaces which, in turn, justify their continuous escalation. These wars manufacture the very dangers they are ostensibly designed to combat. Meanwhile, the industries which fight them become richer and richer. The political officials those industries own become more and more powerful. Brutal drug cartels monopolize an unimaginably profitable, no-competition industry, while Terrorists are continuously supplied the perfect rationale for persuading huge numbers of otherwise unsympathetic people to join them or support them. Everyone wins—except for ordinary citizens, who become poorer and poorer, more and more imprisoned, meeker and meeker, and less and less free.

Belén Fernández is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is an editor at PULSE Media, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Al Jazeera, AlterNet, Guernica Magazine, and many other publications.

Could this be the basis of the new Jim Crow? Could the incarceration of so many black men be a continuation under a different guise of the penal system that [...]]]> In a recent post, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson offered a familiar argument about the origins of mass incarceration in the United States:

Could this be the basis of the new Jim Crow? Could the incarceration of so many black men be a continuation under a different guise of the penal system that developed in the South after Reconstruction? Could this be, paraphrasing Robert Michels and our own use of his Iron Law of Oligarchy, ‘the Iron Law of Discrimination’?

To support their ‘New Jim Crow’ interpretation, Acemoglu and Robinson draw on the work of David Oshinsky, whose book Worse Than Slavery examines the development of convict labor as the lynchpin of Jim Crow era black labor control.

There are two aspects of the ‘New Jim Crow’ interpretation that make it superficially convincing. First, incarceration is a system of social control. Second, black men are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates. Here, for instance, is Acemoglu and Robinson’s chart for White, Hispanic, and Black male incarceration:

So it appears that there is a racialized system of social control, the present one analogous to the past one – a new Jim Crow.

However, there are some very important differences between the political economy of the mainly agrarian, Jim Crow penal system and the current, urban system of mass incarceration. If the penal system functioned as a system of social control in both eras, the aim of that social control was very different. In the Jim Crow era, the central issue was how to get formerly slaves to work for their former masters on the plantations now that blacks enjoyed a nominal freedom. As Eric Foner showed in his classic Nothing But Freedom, turning former slaves into an agricultural proletariat is the central political question of all post-emancipation societies. The shift from coerced slave labor to forced wage-labor is not a natural one, and emancipated slaves often have a different idea about the freedom they ought to enjoy than former masters. As Foner showed, in the Reconstruction South, blacks preferred just about anything to selling their labor to former masters. They engaged in subsistence farming, moved to cities, and in some cases – such as in Edisto Island – they occupied former plantations and ran the farms themselves, until the end of Reconstruction brought an end to their political and social power and land was returned to former slave masters.

Even under those conditions, former slaves were recalcitrant wage-laborers – the dull compulsion of economic need was insufficient to meet the labor needs of Southern employers. Foner details the way Jim Crow era criminal law was used not just to produce convict labor, but to eliminate all other employment options for blacks (self-employment, use of public lands, lynching of those who tried to leave, criminalization of vagrancy and debt). With no other economic options, ‘free’ wage-laborers were forced to sell their labor to former employers. As the Committee of the Freedmen of Edisto Island said, in their reply to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had asked the former slaves to return land on which they were homesteading to its former owners:

“General we want Homestead’s; we were promised Homestead’s by the government…[but] the government Haveing concluded to befriend Its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between Its self and us Its allies In the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and thier all time ememies.”

This criminalization of a use of land (homesteading) that had been promised to slaves was, as the Edisto freedmen saw, a way of removing all options save ‘freely’ “working for…their all time enemies.”

So the main purpose of the penal system under Jim Crow was not to produce the directly coerced and cheap convict labor itself, though that was certainly a part of the regime of exploitation, but to produce a forced labor regime with nominally free labor. (Lest we think this was merely a Southern project, as Richard Bensel showed in Yankee Leviathan, the North was content with this new regime of controlled labor. Financiers were happy since it brought cotton back online – and thus foreign exchange to pay back debts and stabilize the dollar – and industrialists were now more concerned with the emerging problem of labor control, and increasingly troubled by the precedent set for the North by redistributing land and property to Southern freedmen.)

Robinson and Acemoglu thus mischaracterize the specific problem of social control in this period when they characterize the “practical problem” of Jim Crow in the following way:

“now that blacks were no longer slaves and could not be directly disciplined and punished by their masters, how should they be kept under control? Locking them up — when mob violence and lynchings didn’t do the job — seemed like a natural idea, but this would cost the state a lot of money, especially at a time when resources were scarce and the prison system was both underdeveloped and severely gutted by the Civil War.”

The problem was not a ‘general’ one of how to control free blacks, but a specific modality of social control: how to produce a docile agricultural proletariat. Though Acemoglu and Robinson are sensitive to the thought idea that underlying Jim Crow was a particular “extractive regime,” they miss the way in which Jim Crow was a kind of exercise in primitive accumulation. One of the key features of primitive accumulation is the use of direct coercion until the wage-labor/capital relationship is naturalized – at which point Marx’s famous ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ takes over. The political struggle, at least for a brief time, during Reconstruction was whether emancipation would mean real liberation – Jim Crow settled the question securely in favor of former plantation owners, and the criminal law was the central instrument through which wage-labor was instituted.

The social control problem of the 1970s was decidedly different. It was as much if not more Northern and Southern, it was as much if not more urban than agrarian – indeed the urban race riots of the late 1960s and early 70s were a key precipitating event, alongside racial mutinies on the front lines of Vietnam, the rise of the Black Panthers, and the civil rights struggle. But in the background, the key political-economic shift was not from slave to proletariat, but from proletariat to lumpenproletariat. The flight of middle class blacks from desegregating inner cities, deindustrialization, the loss of jobs in the North, and increasingly concentrated urban unemployment among black males produced a surplus labor population. The role of the criminal justice system in this context was to police an underclass, not make workers out of slaves. And it became increasingly so as other, more benign, modes of social control – like welfare, public housing – sputtered. This new carceral regime invovled the state taking on direct responsibility for control of a population now that it lacked a strong tie to economic life. And it did so by criminalizing one of its few economic activities: drugs. The war on drugs was the pivotal instrument for introducing this new form of social control. It not only massively increased the prison population, but subjected them, and urban black communities more widely, to the continual supervision of public coercive authority. The statistics are familiar, but here is a chart from the Bureau of Justice (h/t Kareem Reda for forwarding the image from the Sentencing Project)

Note that just as the use of convict labor dwindles the prison population explodes. Where during Jim Crow convict labor and the criminal law was an appendage of the wider, Southern agricultural political economy, in the new era of mass incarceration it is imprisonment that is the point. Being jailed or being threatened with imprisonment is the instrument for containing the problems left by the failure of society to deal with mass unemployment not mass unwillingness to sell labor. Put another way, under Jim Crow the point of criminalization was to create wage-laborers, under the drug war the point is to create criminals.

In both cases, there are/were better alternatives. The freedmen could have been given forty acres and a mule. Urban blacks could be given jobs (not to mention legalize drugs) rather than rap sheets. But in both cases, blacks needed the political support of non-blacks – always a real though fragile possibility. And in both cases, the penal system served not just to control black populations, but also to divide them from their potential allies.

I want to rejoin a debate I’ve engaged in on and off with my colleague Peter Frase, about his signature issues of work and unemployment.

In his latest post, Peter  summarizes the debate pretty well. He has long argued, as he reiterates, “that in the quest for full [...]]]>

I want to rejoin a debate I’ve engaged in on and off with my colleague Peter Frase, about his signature issues of work and unemployment.

In his latest post, Peter  summarizes the debate pretty well. He has long argued, as he reiterates, “that in the quest for full employment, we ought to be less obsessed with maximizing job creation and more concerned with making it easier and better to not be employed.”

Now he advances the discussion by citing “the most persuasive argument” against his own view: the proposition “that unemployment is really bad for people, and they don’t like it, and therefore it’s very important to minimize its incidence.”

Peter’s rejoinder is roughly as follows: The pernicious effects of unemployment on human well-being (and they are profound and well-documented, I would add) aren’t inherent to the condition of joblessness, but are instead the consequence of a social stigma. The right response, rather than surrendering to the job-creation imperative, is, as he puts it, “simultaneously a demand for policies like the Basic Income and an ideological campaign against the hegemony of the work ethic.”

So that’s Peter’s position. The problem with this line of argument, in my view, is that it treats the work ethic and the “stigma” of unemployment as if they were arbitrary social shibboleths — as if the unemployed were forced into social disgrace because of some outmoded superstition inherited from the benighted past that could be eradicated with a properly enlightened awareness campaign, like the old stigmas around red hair or left-handedness.

Now, part of the stigma of unemployment arises from the fact those who have failed to find jobs are the “losers” in a social competition. When aggregate demand is inadequate, some people will find themselves unemployed – the system will guarantee that — but it will appear as if those people have failed as individuals. The degree to which society ends up blaming those individuals or the system itself will depend on the kinds of mechanisms discussed by Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole in their classic paper on “Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics.”

But in reality the problem goes deeper than that. Even if the unemployed could just gracefully withdraw from the competition for jobs, there would still be a problem. The problem arises from the objective facts of life in a society with a large-scale division of labor — a society in which we all individually contribute labor and draw income from a collective, integrated productive apparatus.

An inherent feature of that system is that it generates a certain distribution of income. But it also generates a certain distribution of work. And while it’s obvious that people care about the fairness of the income distribution, in fact they also care of about the fairness of the work distribution.

Just as there is an impulse to resent income inequality, especially when it’s seen as “undeserved” (e.g., ever-growing CEO pay or university presidents who pull down seven-figure salaries), there is also an impulse to resent those with “undeserved” advantages in the distribution of work, such as idle heirs and rentiers, or the occupants of sinecures obtained through political favors.

The general principle is not that everyone should be poor or that everyone should work like a dog. Some people do believe these things, but they tend to be special cases. The more general – in fact, almost universal — feeling is that it’s problematic when some are poor and others rich, or when some spend their lives working while others are at leisure.

Such situations are usually held to require some specific social justification. The justifications that are furnished are often specious, but they’re always necessary. For example, those who uphold unequal wealth feel the need to point to some special contribution that the wealthy make to society. Those who argue that society should support the disabled, the elderly, or those excluded from the job market, without requiring them to work, point to their specific life circumstances to justify the exemption. The details of such arguments are obviously subject to ideological conflict; but the basic moral intuition that the distribution of work is a question of fairness and justice is practically intrinsic to the situation. In fact, exactly the same principle is at work when we indict the unequal gender distribution of domestic labor within the two-earner household.

Feudal-type societies always had idle classes of warriors and priests — nobles and clergy — whose lifestyles were supported by the work of the majority. But such arrangements always had to be justified to the working masses by pointing to special social functions that the higher orders supposedly performed – in this case, military protection and spiritual guidance, respectively.  As European society became more secular, and the meritocratic state made a hereditary warrior class superfluous, the old feudal justifications lost their power and eventually those classes were stripped of their legitimacy and, in various ways, overthrown. Something analogous exists in Israel, where ultra-orthodox Jews insist on exemptions from military service and justify the demand by claiming to provide an alternative service to the state, namely their prayers to God. This claim was never taken seriously by secular Israelis, and the resentment it generates has now reached “a boiling point, a moral crisis.” But the fact that it’s made at all is revealing.

That’s why, in the ten-point program laid out by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, one of the points — along with demands for progressive taxation and abolition of inheritance – was the “equal liability of all to work.” Marx was hardly a proponent of the work ethic as such: the key word there was not “liability,” but “equal.”

So long as social reproduction requires alienated work, there will always be this social demand for the equal liability of all to work, and an uneasy consciousness of it among those who could work but who, for whatever reason, don’t. That’s why in our era, wealthy heirs and heiresses – those rare individuals whose decisions about work are truly choices – generally choose not to lead lives of pure leisure but instead present themselves as being busy with ostensible labor, running family foundations or designing handbags. It’s why Warren Buffett, whose offspring need never work a single day, claims that he wants to leave them “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.”

It would be wrong to attribute this attitude entirely to some leftover Protestant ethic that values labor as a positive good. Some of that exists, but if it were the main factor we would expect to see an epidemic of guilt and shame over the slothful five-day week. The more fundamental motive, I think, is to avoid the perception of an unfair distribution of work.

So I’m left cold by the suggestion – if this is what Peter is suggesting – that it would be better to transform the 12.5 million Americans forced out of work by the recession into a quasi-permanent class of idle citizens, supported in greater comfort by 140 million working Americans, and socially legitimated by an “ideological campaign” to convince both groups that this is somehow a perfectly desirable situation. Even if it were a perfectly desirable situation, I don’t think the ideological campaign would work, because it would fly in the face of the basic ethical norm highlighted by Marx and Engels: the “equal liability of all to work.”

This is also essentially my objection to the second half of Peter’s proposal: that a universal Basic Income be used as a tool for pursuing full employment, by reducing the demand for jobs rather than increasing the supply of them. I can’t see how this could work except by creating precisely such classes of arbitrarily idled citizens, supported by their fellow citizens. For one thing, it strikes me as presumptuous to assume that most unemployed would want this — that their current desire to have a job like the majority of their fellow working-age adults is some species of false consciousness. And even if you accepted that it was false consciousness, curable via an ideological campaign valorizing non-work, what would the effect be on the 140 million remaining workers?

None of this means that emancipation from wage-work – Peter’s great theme – is anything less than vital for socialist politics. On the contrary, it is in some ways socialism’s ultimate telos. But we need to think about it carefully.

First of all, we need to be aware that changes in working time can happen either on the intensive margin (change in hours per worker) or the extensive margin (change in the number of workers per capita). I strongly defend the proposition that emancipation from wage-work should happen through the reduction of working-time along the intensive margin. For example, if labor productivity grows by 2% per year, working time could be reduced by the same amount annually without any decline in per capita income. The resulting trajectory of working time would look something like this:

Reducing work-time in this kind of way, along the intensive margin, is enormously preferable, because everyone benefits equally and together. The alternative – reducing the number of workers per capita – amounts to the creation of essentially arbitrary classes of idle and segmented citizens, whose existence would be virtually guaranteed to divide and embitter the working class to the benefit of reactionary pro-work politics. (And actually, for this reason, I think such a program would probably never gain enough political support to be implemented in the first place.)

Second, if the Basic Income is not the right path to full employment, that doesn’t mean it has no useful function. It has great potential to improve the quality of work. As Peter has often pointed out, guaranteeing a subsistence income would make it much harder for employers to persuade low-wage workers to take unpleasant jobs, creating a powerful incentive to either eliminate or improve bad jobs via technology. The issue of qualitative work inequality is just as important as the quantitative issue, and the Basic Income could potentially be transformative here.

But the fact remains that we will never make progress toward emancipation from wage-work without first achieving full employment. As I argued in an earlier iteration of this debate with Peter:

The politics implicit in his argument are fundamentally perverse. For the fact is that the working class is never more obsessed with jobs than in a period of joblessness, and never less obsessed with jobs than in a time of full employment. The only viable route to a mass politics of post-productivism is a permanent plenitude of paid, alienated work. If that seems like a contradiction, it is not. It is simply a paradox.

Full employment is the demand for an expansion of employment until everyone who wants a job can easily get one at the prevailing standard of working time – and that standard, we hope, will be an ever-falling one. That is not a surrender to productivism. It’s the first step,  among many others, toward transcending it.

The most persuasive argument against this view is that unemployment is really bad for people, and they don’t like it, and [...]]]>

Curtis White rightly concludes that plutocratic philanthropoids are primarily in the business of “risk management.” Indeed, the institutionalized tax evasion that enables [...]]]> “With all life on Planet Earth in the process of being consumed by capitalism, the literal belief in otherworldly magic is something that concerned citizens should be very worried about.”

Curtis White rightly concludes that plutocratic philanthropoids are primarily in the business of “risk management.” Indeed, the institutionalized tax evasion that enables beneficent elites to replenish their philanthropies provides them with the ideal means of undermining the government’s already limited provision of public welfare, and for “managing and limiting the ambitions” of grassroots activists to boot.

Unfortunately though, White fails to point out the central role that such philanthropic elites have played in nurturing supernatural sensibilities within their environmental grantees: an issue of magical dimensions that will be explored in this essay by scrutinizing the philanthropic communities ties to the original commissioning (and then decommissioning) source for his article, Orion Magazine.

Orion has long been a favorite fixture for environmentalists of a deep-ecological bent, which makes it all the more astonishing that so many capitalists support this crusading magazine — a particularly notable one being Google. Likewise for a magazine that regularly publishes the work of anarcho-primitivist Derrick Jensen (Jensen prefers the term anarcho-indigenist) — an individual who forthrightly advocates the necessity of violent action to bring an end to capitalism and modern civilization — it is ironic that they benefit from a philanthropic trust derived from the wealth of the the most infamous of all robber barons, Henry Clay Frick (that is, the plutocrat whom the anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate in 1892).

Here the philanthropic body in question is the Helen Clay Frick Foundation (named after Henry’s daughter), and residing on their board of directors is none other than Peter P. Blanchard III (whose mother was the granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick). Peter’s philanthropic location is significant because he is a board member of Orion Magazine.

And as one might expect of a man with such a distinguished ruling-class pedigree, Peter is far from radical. In fact he is highly committed to the type of environmental preservation that is so typical of Big Green (the Sierra Club, et. al.) — having previously served on the boards of both the Maine and New Jersey chapters of The Nature Conservancy, and on the boardroom of the related Trust for Public Land.

Yet philanthropically-speaking the best-endowed member of Orion Magazine’s board of directors is arguably well-heeled art curator Wendy Tarlow Kaplan. I say this because she is married to Martin Kaplan, whose numerous charitable concerns include acting as the Secretary of one of the four major funders of Orion, the Germeshausen Foundation.

Illustrative of Orion Magazine’s philosophical output Martin is a board member of the Thomas Berry Foundation; a foundation that was created in 1998 to spread the late Thomas Berry’s unique brand of deep green eco-mysticism. This brings us back to our friend Derrick Jensen who among radical circles has done more than most to celebrate such magical fashions, devoting a number of recent interviews — including one with Berry — to this endeavor in his book How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating The Earth From Civilization (PM Press, 2008).

Recall now that the longstanding and incisive critic of deep ecology, the late Murray Bookchin, was of the opinion that with regards to deep ecology, “no other ‘radical’ ecology philosophy could be more congenial to the ruling elites of our time.” So bearing this in mind it is imminently appropriate that Thomas Berry should have been honored to serve on the Council of Sages of one of Lawrence Rockefeller’s pet projects, the California Institute of Integral Studies; a center which provides an institutional home to the type of unrepentant new-ageism that could only thrive in an era of intellectual irrelevance and post-modernism such as ours. In such a reactionary “academic” atmosphere, Jungian metaphysics are born-again, as mystical (often indigenous) knowledge is welded as a potent weapon to beat back the principles of the Enlightenment promoted by those pesky materialists… capitalists and socialists alike.

With all life on Planet Earth in the process of being consumed by capitalism, the literal belief in otherworldly magic is something that concerned citizens should be very worried about, especially those fortunate enough to be detached from the payola of the philanthropic complex.

As a particularly relevant example, Rudolf Steiner’s special brand of Christian mysticism (Anthroposophy) is now very much in vogue in environmental circles, as it has been for some time. For instance, America’s most famous organic farmer, John Peterson — who came to global fame in the award-winning documentary film The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2005) — is a vocal disciple of Steiner’s spiritual gardening, biodynamic farming.

Yet despite it’s kooky image, the promotion of such anti-materialistic solutions to the very real material problems facing humanity is dangerous to say the least. And Peter Staudenmaier concludes his exhaustive investigation of the history of Steiner’s spiritual work by warning that the “enduring legacy” of Anthroposophy’s “collusion with ecofascism makes it plainly unacceptable for those working toward a humane and ecological society.”

John Peterson’s farm is often touted as one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in the United States, but where small is beautiful is normally the order of the day the 310-acre biodynamically run Roxbury Farm certainly rivals its size on the CSA-scene. Roxbury is run by Jody Bolluyt an individual who works closely with the Equity Trust, serving on their board of trustees alongside Orion Magazine’s Managing Director, Madeline Cantwell. Funding for the Equity Trust’s sustainable work comes courtesy of the likes of the Boston Foundation and the RSF Social Finance (formerly the Rudolf Steiner Foundation); the latter of which finance the work of the Orion Society (the publisher of Orion Magazine).

None of this should however be too surprising really as the founding Editor-in-Chief of Orion, George Russell is a practicing Anthroposophist and presently teaches at the Center for Anthroposophy in New York.

Here it is interesting to observe that the founder of Equity Trust, the late Chuck Matthei in-turn helped inspire the creation of the new age hub, the Center for Whole Communities, at the organic run Knoll Farm, in Vermont — a Center which describes itself as “a land-based leadership development organization.” Founded in 2001 by Knoll Farm owners, Helen Whybrow and Peter Forbes (who had prior to this spent eighteen years leading preservation projects for the Trust for Public Land), the Center was legally incorporated three years later with the aid of six other individuals, one of whom is environmental writer John Elder, who is represented on Orion Magazine’s advisory board. The Center was honored to receive their first ever philanthropic grant from the Merck Family Fund whose generosity helped put their venture on the path to financial viability: a philanthropic outlet whose former Executive Director, one might recall from White’s article, was Betsy Taylor (the founder of the Center for a New American Dream).

The wholesome sounding Center for Whole Communities has also received financial support from the Geraldine R[ockefeller] Dodge Foundation, which was set up by our favorite oily plutocrats. Thus in keeping with the Rockefeller families attempts to manage environmental resistance, the Dodge Foundation also helps finance Orion Magazine, and in fact Orion board member David Grant previously served as the head of the foundation (for twelve years no less). While the foundation’s chairman — another Rockefeller heir no less — Christopher J. (Kim) Elliman, works for an assortment of Big Green groups and adds a new age feather to his bow by acting as a trustee of the Garrison Institute: an organization whose web site notes that their work “applies the transformative power of contemplation to today’s pressing social and environmental concerns, helping build a more compassionate, resilient future.” Here one especially notable person sitting alongside Betsy Taylor on the Institutes’ advisory board is the eco-capitalist guru and former Trust for Public Land activist Paul Hawken.

The Hawken-connection is pertinent to this article because although he has authored a number of pioneering books on green capitalism, what is less well-known is the topic of Hawken’s first book, The Magic of Findhorn (Souvenir Press, 1975), which explored the role that angels can fulfill in revising humankind’s destructive relationship with planet earth. This book accomplished this stunning feat by eulogizing the early history of the Scottish-based Findhorn Community, a group which presently describes itself as “a spiritual community, ecovillage and an international centre for holistic education, helping to unfold a new human consciousness and create a positive and sustainable future.”

As mentioned in Curtis White’s article (“The Philanthropic Complex”) Betsy Taylor is the founder of the Center for a New American Dream. But while White uses this group as a sad example of the all too common funding deficit that presents itself for “organizations whose missions foreground the ‘sociological and spiritual’”; I would argue that this is not quite true.

Indeed, groups that meet such criteria are actually quite well-funded by capitalists, but of course no-where near to the same extent as the Big Green. Furthermore, the difference between the Center for a New American Dream and the Big Green is not quite as clear as White makes out, as over the years the Center has included numerous individuals on their board of directors many of which are very much part of the established Big Green order. It therefore seems a little disingenuous to suggest, as White does, that an organization that was always very much part of the Green establishment was somehow corrupted by philanthropic funders as late as 2007; the web of “risk management” philanthropy is dense indeed. That said, despite making this point, I don’t doubt the deleterious effect that elitist funders (like the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation) continued to exert on the organizations evolution.

Last of all, while White correctly highlights the fact that “Smaller, more principled organizations” often get “left out in the cold” by the philanthropic complex, he picks a strange example of a grassroots organization — seemingly following the left-liberal lead of Orion contributing editor Mark Dowie — by drawing attention to the work of the Native Forest Council. Principled and small it may be, especially when viewed in relation to the Big Green, but it is hardly a suitable example of a organization that is far removed from the green philanthropic complex.

It is appropriate then, that despite Dowie’s previous efforts to document the anti-democratic activities of liberal foundations that he sees no alternative to the ongoing efforts by philanthropic elites to engage in social engineering, and certainly recognizes no viable alternative to capitalism. Thus his conclusion to American Foundations: An Investigative History (MIT Press, 2001) is: “it seems clear that the only way to make foundations true and effective servants of civilization instead of stewards of plutocracy is to democratize them.” However, Dowie’s liberal conclusions are at odds with not only the author of this article, but also other, more radical critics of liberal philanthropy, which includes Curtis White. For a useful overview of such radical criticism one would do well to read Joan Roelofs’ Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003).

Either way there is no doubt that from Dowie’s perspective, as from my own and White’s, that the impact of liberal foundations on all manner of progressive social movements is highly problematic. Addressing and resolving this sensitive issue will be difficult given the massive economic and political resources at the disposal of liberal philanthropists, which will certainly be used to undermine any such efforts.

It is therefore vital that concerned citizens educate themselves about the back-room dealings of liberal philanthropists so that they are able to pose an effective challenge to the latter’s ongoing cultural domination of civil society. In this way, it is hoped that this article will help people participate in the perpetual struggle for democracy.

Are we done yet? Do we have to endure another full day of self-congratulation at Obama’s personal endorsement of same-sex marriage? His announcement was heralded with as much praise as last summer’s legalization of gay marriage in New York. And that was, you know, actual legislation.

This is hardly surprising given the fact that [...]]]>

Are we done yet? Do we have to endure another full day of self-congratulation at Obama’s personal endorsement of same-sex marriage? His announcement was heralded with as much praise as last summer’s legalization of gay marriage in New York. And that was, you know, actual legislation.

This is hardly surprising given the fact that marriage equality is designed to distract liberal consciences and give Democrats political cover to gut social services. While the passage of gay marriage enjoyed the support of prominent campaign donors, it was directly preceded by cuts to homeless shelters for queer youth. It’s a campaign season bait-and-switch — winning votes without making real concessions.

Case in point: Bloomberg commended Obama for joining a legacy of “courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, stretching back to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.” This days after slashing youth homeless shelter funding by $7 million, in a city where 40% of homeless youth are LGBT.

Looked at from this vantage point, the chief beneficiaries of gay marriage will be Crate & Barrel, not the queer folks with the most desperate needs. There is an obvious disconnect between the desires of politically connected, wealthy gay people and the needs of queer youth, and yet the major gay rights organizations have all rallied around gay marriage as if it will solve the problems of gay people everywhere, regardless of race or class.

Gay marriage proponents feed us two flavors of justification for their crusade. For the romantics they supply fantasy — the notion that legal inclusion brings social justice; for the cynics, they tout the thousand individual rights that a marriage certificate bestows.

These arguments should raise serious red flags for the Jacobin rank-and-file, and indeed, neither holds water. You’d think in the “age of the 99%,” we teeming masses would be able to see that what’s good for the few isn’t good for us all. It’s true that marriage comes with material advantages — healthcare, citizenship, and inheritance chief among them — but therein also lies the problem. Marriage consolidates privilege by creating a legal basis for denying access to those thousand rights; it literally sanctions discrimination. Instead of bestowing rights based on relationship status, the state should guarantee those rights for all people. Instead we attach basic rights to an institution with a 50% failure rate.

The obsession with marriage also sanitizes the history of queer struggle. Stonewall was not a wedding, it was a riot, led by the very queers who are now erased from the public image of gay equality. Drag queens, trans people of color, young queers, and butch dykes fought systematic violence and in Sarah Schulman’s words, “[...] arose to change society, to expand rigid gender roles, to break down confining social mores of privatized families and to defy the consumerism that accompanies monogamy and nuclear family lifestyle in the United States.” That transformative vision has been sidelined by the marriage crowd, who are content to bestow rights only on the deserving few. Are there really members of our society undeserving of health care?

Only the most privileged among us could possibly see the fight for the right to party as a movement for social justice. Proponents tout the implications for healthcare and immigration status while members of our queer and trans communities are denied basic treatment in prison, while they are harassed and ejected by ICE. Loving couples making a public commitment to one another is a beautiful thing, but it is erroneously touted by gay rights groups as the single most pressing justice issue facing queer people. Issues of access to healthcare, education, and housing go unmentioned.

Look no further than Argentina for real leadership in queer politics. While we were busy patting ourselves on the back, the Argentine legislature passed the Gender Identity Law, arguably the most gender-affirming bill in any country, to date. Argentineans can now change their legal genders without having to demonstrate any medical treatment, and the public and private healthcare systems in the country are banned from charging extra for gender-related therapies or procedures. These changes may not have the comforting ring of wedding bells, but they address administrative inequalities that present huge obstacles to trans people in accessing basic services. And it teaches us that by building power for vulnerable communities, legislative reform can be an important part of movements for social justice.

It’s far to soon to say what the elections in France and Greece mean for the future of austerity in Europe. François Hollande may turn out to be a meek Sarkozy-lite—or he may be pushed in that direction by the German government, the bond markets, and the European Central Bank. Greece, meanwhile, is still [...]]]>

It’s far to soon to say what the elections in France and Greece mean for the future of austerity in Europe. François Hollande may turn out to be a meek Sarkozy-lite—or he may be pushed in that direction by the German government, the bond markets, and the European Central Bank. Greece, meanwhile, is still in a state of flux, although the rise of the radical-left Syriza is encouraging (even as the sectarianism of the Greek Communist Party is dispiriting). Greece may be looking at another round of elections, and the rise in support for the fascist Golden Dawn party suggests that things could get dangerous if the left isn’t able to come together in coalition. In any case, I’m certainly not the one to make expert pronouncements on all this, and I’d direct you instead to my Jacobin comrade Seth Ackerman.

I hope Hollande is right, and “austerity can no longer be the only option.” Whatever else it ultimately achieves, the resurgence of the European electoral Left has provoked a defensive response from the propagandists of the austerity faction, who have raced to denounce the foolish notion that our problems can be solved in any way other than by sadistically punishing ordinary people while further enriching the financial elite. The dumbed-down mass market version of this comes, naturally, from David Brooks:

The recession grew out of and exposed long-term flaws in the economy. Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt.

There are several overlapping structural problems. First, there are those surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.

Then there are the structural issues surrounding the decline in human capital. The United States, once the world’s educational leader, is falling back in the pack. Unemployment is high, but companies still have trouble finding skilled workers.

Singing from the same hymnal, but for the highbrow crowd, we have Raghuram Rajan:

With the aid of technology and capital, one skilled worker can displace many unskilled workers. . . .

Not all low-skilled jobs have disappeared. Nonroutine, low-paying service jobs that are hard to automate or outsource, such as taxi driving, hairdressing, or gardening, remain plentiful. So the U.S. work force has bifurcated into low-paying professions that require few skills and high-paying ones that call for creativity and credentials. Comfortable, routine jobs that require moderate skills and offer good benefits have disappeared, and the laid-off workers have had to either upgrade their skills or take lower-paying service jobs.

Unfortunately, for various reasons—inadequate early schooling, dysfunctional families and communities, the high cost of university education—far too many Americans have not gotten the education or skills they need. Others have spent too much time in shrinking industries, such as auto manufacturing, instead of acquiring skills in growing sectors, such as medical technology.

There is an odd dissonance in these accounts, however, one that’s more obvious in Rajan’s version than in Brooks’. First, we are told that the stagnation of wages and the disappearance of jobs is an unchangeable structural fact: globalization and technology dictate that the demand for labor will be split between a handful of high-skill, “superstar” jobs and a mass of menial, poverty-wage service work. Yet we are also told that we face a deficit of “human capital”, implying that adequate education is all that anyone needs to escape the trap of unemployment or low wages.

There is an odd sort of Lake Wobegonism in this prescription, in which everyone gets to be above average in the labor market. This is, perhaps, a style of argument well-suited to appeal to Americans, who believe they can all become millionaires and never get sick. But we are given no reason to suppose that an investment in education will change the sort of labor demanded by capitalist enterprises. Just because everyone is qualified for high-skill “superstar” positions doesn’t mean that we can all inhabit those positions; someone still has to fill all those “low-paying service jobs that are hard to automate or outsource”. Ceteris paribus, more education is just a recipe for more PhDs on food stamps. It’s also the setup for another round of zero-sum, beggar-thy-neighbor neoliberalism, in which countries, localities and social groups fight to take the good jobs for themselves while foisting the bad jobs off on somebody else.

A simple solution to this problem, of course, would be to compensate those forced into the bad jobs by transferring lots of money from the “superstars” to the low-waged. But I suspect that suggestion would provoke Brooks or Rajan to go all Edward Conard on us.

Philosophically, the Brooks and Rajan essays are interesting for the way they awkwardly combine an old-fashioned style of conservatism (the poor will always be with us, accept your lot) with a more modern form of inclusive neoliberalism (accept deregulation, and you too can be rich!) By itself, the first style of argument is simply intolerable to modern sensibilities, but the crisis has rendered the second increasingly implausible. Together, however, the two arguments add up to nonsense.

The simplest response is that self-styled critics of “structural” economic problems are not being structural enough. The existence of a hyper-polarized wage structure is not a fact of nature but is itself a structural problem, and one that has been facilitated by specific policy choices. What we need is not “human capital” but a shift away from protecting rentiers and toward strengthening the bargaining position of labor.

I

I can see why Tim Barker thinks that my career as a contrarian is over.  Here I am defending consumer culture—in his terms, “the culture of capitalism”—so how can I be speaking truth to power?  As he knows, the power to which I have been speaking all these years [...]]]>

I

I can see why Tim Barker thinks that my career as a contrarian is over.  Here I am defending consumer culture—in his terms, “the culture of capitalism”—so how can I be speaking truth to power?  As he knows, the power to which I have been speaking all these years is the left-liberal historiographical establishment, not the imperialist warmongers (although, for the record, I have tried in my own diffident, academic way to criticize both capitalism and imperialism).  My goal, all along, has been to unsettle the assumptions that regulate the thinking of the academic and the larger Left, to let us see capitalism, socialism, consumerism, and democracy—also pragmatism, feminism, and the corporation—differently.  Not complacently, differently.  But now, in this trade book, I’ve become just another shill for corporate capitalism and its cultural attendants?

It seems so.  To judge from Barker’s review, I’ve unsettled nothing; at any rate none of his leftist assumptions were dislodged or even remotely disturbed by my polemic.  So I have to wonder why his review is so forgiving, so benign, so friendly.  This is the journal called Jacobin, where the harmless Ezra Klein gets flogged for being a liberal, right?  Why then doesn’t the young radical excoriate the old apologist, the guy who’s “defending the culture of capitalism”?  I’m not begging for punishment, mind you, although I have a professional interest in male masochism (no, really).  I just want to know why Barker lets me off the hook.

There are three possible explanations of this clemency.  First, I’ve got some residual left-wing credentials.  It’s true, I remain something of a Marxist, and go beyond David Harvey or Robert Brenner by “claiming that the re-investment of profits is no longer even necessary for economic growth,” and arguing for redistribution on these unique grounds, where capitalists and their criteria are simply superfluous; it’s also true that I have urged the Left to adopt FUCK WORK as its slogan; finally, it’s true that I’m an enthusiastic supporter of and occasional participant in Occupy Wall Street.  Second, I do “address the argument that consumerism is a barrier to social change,” apparently to Barker’s satisfaction because he doesn’t contest my conclusions.  Third, I am “uncannily optimistic,” and so cannot be blamed for my political idiocies, not any more than a naive bandmate can be blamed for his unrealistic dreams of a record contract.

But still.  Who on the Left is not in favor of income redistribution?  To be sure, most of you urge this policy as a moral imperative in the name of the poor, whereas I see it as an eminently practical and necessary corrective to the problem of surplus capital in the hands of clueless CEOs—by my accounting, the 99% has a long-term economic interest rather than an immediate moral stake in turning the oligarchs into public servants.  But wait, poor Ezra Klein is Keynesian enough to oppose austerity, and to recommend a more equitable distribution of income, yet nobody at Jacobin is letting him off the hook.  Why me?  And who cares where I stand on OWS?  Its core constituency has much less in common with me than with Kalle Lasn (Adbusters), Chris Hedges (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning), and David Graeber (Debt: The First Five Thousand Years)—who, like Barker and almost every other leftist out there, see unbridled consumerism as the gravest threat to the environment, and, accordingly, to their souls.  Again, why does Barker grant me clemency?

II

Clearly it’s my sunny disposition: I get a pass because I’m “uncannily optimistic.”  By this Barker means that I locate the source of my hopes in a conjectural future rather than an actually existing social reality, and therefore can be forgiven for my ignorance of how things work in these times, on this planet.  In effect, and with significant intellectual charity, he’s claims that I’m speaking the language of utopia, writing in the dialect of science fiction, so that any criticism of my ideas must first acknowledge the ironic, quaintly poetic distance I’ve created between the real and the symbolic, between what is and what ought to be.  Here’s the remarkably generous rhetorical turn that makes my rehabilitation possible:

Whatever one makes of the details of his economic argument, the two main points—that we have the productive capacity to reduce working time and expand leisure, and that our present crisis can be explained by the maldistribution of income—will be agreeable to most leftist readers.  And yet, gazing at the rack of almost identical collared shirts gracing Livingston’s cover, these readers might ask themselves why he is so intent on defending the culture of capitalism?

One answer is that he’s only kind of doing that. . . . Instead of defending actually existing capitalist consumerism, he defends the promise of a future which will feature consumption alongside ‘redistributing income and socializing investment’—bringing it under popular control so it can be driven by social concerns rather than mere profit.

This generosity worries me.  If you know that your ethical principles don’t reside in and flow from the historical circumstances that surround you, then you must repudiate or evacuate your time and place—you must somehow escape the past, which means treating the present as the negation of your hopes and treating the future as their only repository.  This attitude toward History typically produces radical, even apocalyptic visions, such as those entertained, once upon a time, by Gerrard Winstanley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maximillien Robespierre—the original Jacobin!—and then John Brown, and now, in our own time, by Kalle Lasn, Chris Hedges, and David Graeber.

If, on the other hand, you know that your ethical principles are not fully inscribed but are still faintly legible in those historical circumstances, you will find promise in your own time and place, and you’ll want to stay put—you’ll think of the past as an archive of possibility, which means treating the present as the cause of your hopes and treating the future as an open question.  This attitude toward History typically produces pragmatic approaches that are nonetheless revolutionary, or at least progressive, such as those developed, once upon a time, by James Madison, G.W.F. Hegel, Toussaint Louverture, and then Abraham Lincoln, and now, in our own time, by almost no one on the Left or Right.  Things do fall apart these days.

In any event, I’m with the pragmatists.  What young John Dewey said on the choice between Kant and Hegel still seems indisputable to me:  “This, indeed, is the failure of the Kantian Ethics: in separating what should be from what is, it deprives the latter, the existing social world as well as the desires of the individual, of all moral value; while by the same separation, it condemns that which should be to a barren abstraction.  An ‘ought’ which does not root in and flower from the ‘is,’ which is not the fuller realization of the actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that things should be better.”

So I have to refuse the clemency of this court.  I am, in fact, “defending actually existing capitalist consumerism.”

III

Practically speaking, that means I’m defending commodity fetishism, a.k.a. “reification,” advertising, and most of what else passes for the cultural apparatus of capitalist oppression.

How did I get away with this?

To begin with, I don’t see that consumerism is the handmaiden of capitalism, because I don’t see capitalism as a closed system, a totality that excludes socialism or any other mode of production.  Socialism doesn’t appear or exist only where vanguard parties represent or plant it, as Sombart and Lenin—strange bedfellows—would have it.  Instead, it emerges and evolves as capitalism did in its early stages, without decree or even denomination, in new “social relations of production” that don’t get noticed until it’s too late to reinstate the old.

Markets, commodities, money, merchants, debt, credit, profits, middlemen—we know that all these phenomena preceded what we call capitalism by centuries (unless of course you’re David Graeber, and then you believe it’s been around for five thousand years, anyway).  What makes us think these phenomena will or should disappear when socialism arrives on that beautiful morning when we finally rise to the millennial occasion?  What makes us think that markets exclude distributive justice, or that socialism doesn’t require markets?  What makes us think that consumerism—buying, using, and modifying commodities with pleasure—must validate capitalism and nullify socialism?

The intellectual godfather of economic reform in Eastern Europe, ca. 1957-1991, was Wladzcmierez Brus, who worked with and learned from two of the great economists of the 20^th century: Oskar Lange, who, along with Fred M. Taylor of the University of Michigan, developed a theory of socialist planning that silenced the braying from the stables where Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises bred their reactionary ideas; and Michal Kalecki, who, with his path-breaking studies of business cycles in the 1930s, both anticipated and consolidated the Keynesian Revolution.  Here is what Brus wrote in an essay of 1969 called “Commodity Fetishism and Socialism,” after the Prague Spring: “In given socio-economic circumstances an increase in the scope and importance of commodity relations may, for a number of reasons, facilitate the development of a socialist society.”

My argument on behalf of consumer culture presupposes this obiter dictum as a self-evident proposition.  Democratic socialism—remember, there are backward, fascist, totalitarian variations on this theme—is, or requires, workers’ self-management, private property, distributive as well as commutative justice under the rule of law, political pluralism, and consumers’ sovereignty.  Markets underwrite all of these requirements by enabling and enforcing the supremacy of society over the state.  Democratic socialism cannot then thrive in the absence of markets, and vice versa.  The question for those who value democracy, regardless of what mode of production they favor, is therefore not whether markets and commodities shall prevail, but how.

So I am not apologetically conceding that actually existing consumer culture is a commodified, reified realm of leisurely social interaction which just happens to be convened after work, after hours, post-production.  I am celebrating the fact.  Meanwhile, I’m trying to unsettle the standard-issue left-wing assumption that this realm of leisure is just another annex of capitalism because many commodities congregate there.  In any case, I haven’t gone back to the future.

IV

Let me illustrate my claim about the relation between markets, consumerism, and democratic socialism—or is it mere democracy?—by noticing three recent trends, all derivatives of the Internet.  First, we are witnessing what I have elsewhere called “primitive disaccumulation,” by which I mean the decommodification of information and music permitted by blogging, file sharing, and DIY software.  More people have more access to more information, and more people listen to and produce more music than ever before, and yet they appropriate and distribute more and more of these goods without the mediation of prices and markets.  They’re doing so as participants in a consumer culture.

Second, the social networking made possible—or rather unavoidable—by the Internet has animated consumer boycotts which have changed and are still changing corporate behaviors.  Such boycotts have, not coincidentally, been the leading edge of the cultural revolutions that have transformed politics since the 1950s, when the civil rights movement began using the market power of black consumers to change American folkways.  But the Internet makes a huge difference by compressing the time it takes to mobilize a constituency and, with the same keystrokes, broadening its social composition.   I won’t fan the fires I’ve already lit by suggesting that the Arab Spring recapitulates the “war of position”—the “passive revolution,” as Antonio Gramsci put it—which was first conducted by the civil rights movement in the US, and which was then reenacted in Eastern Europe after 1968.

Third, the rationalization of the “marriage market” via the Internet, like the entry of women into the labor market, has challenged the romantic notions of love that, contrary to the intentions of all parties to the bargain, have always reproduced male supremacy, from Tristan to Byron to Edward.  To be sure, this rationalization of affect categorizes and standardizes the attributes of attraction (like “sexiness”), and thus makes a lot of us long for good old-fashioned love, the flood of passion that sweeps away every emotional embankment.  But notice that this rationalization produces a different flood plain—a more level playing field.  You may not want to step onto that field; it nonetheless produces a closer approximation of gender equity than what was possible in the absence of the market power women can now wield as consumers in their relations with men.

Of course warnings against the dangers of this “leveling” now abound—just as they abound in complaints about the degradation of public opinion in the blogosphere, which, lacking any barriers to entry, is less marketplace of ideas than demolition derby.  Eva Illouz, for example, argues in a brilliant new book (Why Love Hurts [2012]) that men have rigged the marriage market by hedging their emotional bets in ways women can’t, or won’t, and that, in doing so, men have covertly reinstated male supremacy.  What her argument misses is the obvious possibility that women are learning to use both labor and marriage markets to their advantage, and this obvious possibility goes missing because Illouz assumes that rationalized markets are by definition the location of reification, alienation, and oppression—the stronghold of neoliberalism, not the site of social democracy.  As always, the asymmetry of power produced by the market exchange of equivalents between capital and labor is the analytical template, as if the labor theory of value explained all manner of exploitation, as if commodity fetishism were the solvent of genuine feeling for others, as if economic calculation as such were the enemy of the spirit.

V

“You might accept Livingston’s point that there’s nothing a priori immoral or unnatural about the way advertising awakens new desires, but as long as poor people have to sate those desires through borrowing instead of a guaranteed income, it’s easy to look disapprovingly at the manufacture of need.”  Yes, it is easy—too easy, in view of my argument about obesity and income distribution, not to mention consumer debt.

I was trying to make it hard to live by such truisms.  I was trying, that is, to demonstrate that advertising is the last utopian idiom of our time because it’s where freedom is depicted as the release from necessary labor and its attendant anxieties—not the result of hard work, honest living, and plain speech.  The Left, I argue, is still too deeply, even emotionally attached to the idea and the agenda of productive labor, which insists that the consumption of goods is authorized only by the prior production of goods with real value.  Thus the parasitic capitalists become the object of critique because their incomes are deducted from the sum of value produced by less fortunate others: thus we change the world by correcting the relation between effort and reward, between work and income.  I call this combination of idea and agenda the “pathos of productivity.”  I trace it to the Protestant Ethic and bourgeois propriety, of course, but I also ridicule Matthew Crawford’s flamboyantly nostalgic book, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), as the perfection of the Puritan jeremiad, which always brings us back to our callings, those secular vocations we know as work.  Finally, I quote Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Alfred North Whitehead, and Don Draper to say, very politely, FUCK WORK.

We don’t need work to fashion our genuine seIves, to produce character and authenticity.  There’s not enough real work to go around, anyway, so we might as well get on with a discussion of why the relation between the production of value and the receipt of income can never again be understood as a transparently cause-effect relation.  We might as well get on with a discussion of how to detach one from the other—income from work—and entertain, accordingly, the practical applications of the criterion of need, “from each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs.”  We’re already involved in this discussion when we debate so-called transfer payments and entitlements.  More to the point, we’re already involved when we disagree about the meanings of consumer culture.

But good Christ, must I defend advertising?  I thought so.  Here’s why.  The dream world conjured by advertising needs analysis at least as much as the dream world convened by religion.  Neither is a distraction from or a distortion of reality, just another domain of “false consciousness”: both are fundamental realities that require our close attention as human beings, at least if we’re intent on understanding rather than evacuating the world as it actually exists.  For each contains a truth that every human being is eager to live by.  Religious faith teaches us that God is immanent and legible in our everyday lives as a freedom concept—not as the figure of providence, not as a friendly spiritual counselor, not as the abolition of all particular circumstance, but as the unity of desire and capacity, the ability to change our circumstances in accordance with our intentions.

Advertising meanwhile teaches us what Marx did, that true freedom lies beyond the realm of necessity, in the aftermath of hard labor—off the clock, as it were, and after hours.  It doesn’t sell specific commodities, it sells freedom from the world of work.  Of course it does so in the name of corporate profit, so what?  By now this message (FUCK WORK) just is the medium we call advertising.  By the same token, religious establishments still sell salvation, providing comfortable probation from this life, but their customers are always right because they know better—they buy into this profane world, and, judging by the empirical evidence alone, they change it.  The truths of religion and advertising are still “alienated,” which is to say they’re obscure and irrational and archaic, but, like the truths discoverable in dreams, they’re also profound.

VI

The environmental integument is, as always, the last stand of the leftist critic.  “Livingston does address the argument that consumerism is a barrier to social change [Enter, stage left, MLK to Valclav Havel] . . . But when he tries to apply this model of consumer-driven social change to his most provocative claim—consumerism is ‘good for the environment’—he falls regrettably short.”

Do I?  Barker demonstrates my explanatory shortfall with an invocation of “those concerned that our present level and style of consumerism is bad for the environment”—a category that includes everybody, even the benighted David Brooks, even me—and then a series of rhetorical questions.  This double strategy tells me that common sense has been roused from its grammatical underground to discipline the village idiot, to remind us of what can’t be said in public by reciting what is self-evident to the public.

The climate impact of higher incomes—and even of democratically controlled investment—is indeterminate.  With more money to spend, won’t people fly more, and buy more meat (food revolution notwithstanding, after all, beef consumption continued to climb until the recession made people too poor to buy so much)?  Why wouldn’t a democratic public prove as bad at accounting for long-run externalities as private corporations have, perhaps by voting themselves a huge gas subsidy?

Actually, the climate impact of higher incomes is perfectly predictable.  Rich people produce less waste because they can afford to acquire goods that are more durable than the crap the rest of us buy—on credit.  They don’t buy Maseratis, they invest in Priuses, and they create green spaces on their roofs.  They have fewer children than the rest of us, thus defusing what we used to call the population bomb.  And those children go to private schools, where they learn from an early age that the environment is endangered mainly by diabetic fat people, who clearly consume too many calories, too many resources, and too much sidewalk space in Midtown.

My premise is that consumer preferences (“use values”) are better guides to the genuine needs of the majority than the bottom-line goals of the traders and the CEOS.  From that premise, I read the consumer boycotts of the postwar world—from Montgomery, Alabama, and the lettuce fields of California to the online petitions that forced the Komen Foundation to stand down—as the political equivalent of the great strikes that workers waged, once upon a time, to claim that collective bargaining was simple justice, and to declare that if capitalists could treat human beings as uniform means to their limitless end of more money in the bank, then capitalism was morally bankrupt.

Contra Barker, I don’t see any tension between increasing the consumption of use values and keeping the planet livable.  The tension I see is between his version of keeping the planet livable and my hope of improving democracy.  I’m sure that both projects, his and mine, require the kind of de-centered, pluralist markets that would disarm the traders and enable consumers’ sovereignty, forcing private investment to follow the retail demand curve rather than seek speculative outlets wherever they appear.

I’m also sure that he would disagree.  So we can both update our contrarian credentials.

James Livingston, a professor of history at Rutgers, is the author of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul.

Don’t miss our special section on the state of the European left in the new Jacobin –  including Seth Ackerman’s massive introduction on the deeper historical and economic background that lie behind today’s votes in France and Greece:

The default mode of left politics in Europe in the past four decades has been a steady narrowing of [...]]]>

Don’t miss our special section on the state of the European left in the new Jacobin –  including Seth Ackerman’s massive introduction on the deeper historical and economic background that lie behind today’s votes in France and Greece:

The default mode of left politics in Europe in the past four decades has been a steady narrowing of political horizons, a lowering of expectations. But Europe today is witnessing developments that may soon bring an end to the last forty years’ trajectory of steady left decline; whether what comes next will be a revival or a final collapse will be determined by events that lie closer than we think.