Archive for the 'Lifelines' Category
Thursday, November 17th, 2011
A Zinger from Zizek
I’m not a huge fan of Slavoj Zizek. His stuff usually strikes me as being both scattershot and overly, self-consciously “theoretical.” But he does have his powers.
TCT heartily endorses his recent take, as reported in Harper’s, on an issue at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement:
Harper’s: You were critical of some of the slogans used by protesters in 2008 — “Save Main Street, Not Wall Street” for example. During Occupy Wall Street, people say, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Is there a better slogan to be had?
Zizek: The problem is that if you mobilize against the bad financial system you fall into a certain ideological trap, the fascist trap. This is the basic fascist idea: we have the truly productive strata — workers, industrial capitalists — and then we have the bad Jewish bankers who exploit them. The problem is not to fight Wall Street. The problem is, why does the system need Wall Street to function?…If Wall Street collapses, then Main Street collapses. That’s how the system works.
TCT would add that it’s also not very advisable to forget that, along with the financial sector, the supply-side bailouts included corporate capitalism’s beating heart — the automobile industry.
Monday, October 17th, 2011
Yep, It’s a Mess: 15 Problems with Dec99
The posers and kids running the Occupy movement have now responded to their MSM critics by promulgating a 20-point (well, 21-point, actually) Declaration.
With all due gratitude for the obvious and important success of these fine people at raising the vital issues onto the radar, this Declaration is a snarl of confusion, middle-class timidity, and unimaginative dead-ends, not a clarion call to major social change. To my eye, it reveals more about the awful weight of political disunity and discombobulation since the 1960s than it does about new roads to progress.
The problems, in order of occurrence:
Preamble: Discusses structure of U.S. Government and democracy, but fails to mention the radical anti-democracy that is the Senate.
Preamble: Calls for election of a General Assembly to “set forth” a Petition of Grievances, then proceeds to set forth that very document prior to the election of the General Assembly!
Article 1: Includes unions on same footing as corporations, in a document that makes zero mention of either the right to organize unions or labor law reforms.
Article 5: Speaks of tax reform, but remains silent on the question of the mortgage interest deduction.
Article 6: For unspecified reasons, includes “means test” and “opt out” in proposed national, not-for-profit medical insurance, thus ensuring continued game-playing and obstructionism on the topic.
Article 7: Creates arbitrary (and unlikely to be used) power for the EPA and perpetuates the lie that “carbon neutral sources of power” can be found and dropped into the existing order at its present scale and in its present form, while making no mention of any specific programs of conservation or ecological reconstruction.
Article 8: Whole article reads like it was written by a bunch of seventh graders. Shows zero comprehension of the actual possibilities of and problems with government finance, and almost certainly conflicts with the later-stated goal of full-employment.
Article 9: Reproduces the notion that “job training” leads to job creation; socializes the (supposed) cost of “job training” for private sector jobs. Diverts attention from public enterprise/actual methods of job creation. Excuses private sector from scrutiny as an inherently defective engine of job-creation.
Article 10: Seems to (but actually does not) call for debt relief for college students, but makes no mention of credit-card debtors or poverty. Displays zero awareness that college remains a profoundly class-stratified phenomenon.
Article 13: Reproduces the notion that the form of schooling leads to job creation; keeps education tied to “jobs” rather than democracy; misses the fact that private sector teaching pay is worse than public sector teaching pay; makes no mention of the overall education budget, despite huge, long-standing public preference for expansion thereof. Treats loss of jobs to technology as inevitable. Again excuses private sector from scrutiny as an inherently defective source of job creation.
Article 15: Promotes China-bashing and economic warfare, rather than creation of a sustainable, publicly-managed domestic economy.
Article 16: Promotes weak, old rules, rather than calling for creation of publicly-owned banks and insurers.
Article 17: Praises “President Clinton,” an arch-enemy of economic democracy! Also appears to promise retention of the mortgage interest deduction.
Article 18: Appears to promise retention of the mortgage interest deduction.
Resolution (Article 21?): Permits the existing political duopoly to absorb and manipulate all the work of the Occupy movement. Preserves Cold War double-talk by using “corrupt corporatocracy,” rather than “capitalism.” Threatens formation of a new political party, rather than the calling of a Second Constitutional Convention. How does forming a new party within the present money-and-corporation owned system do anything but eat itself alive?
Overall: This document reeks of middle-class bias. This document makes zero specific environmental proposals, and does not mention our crisis of sustainability/capitalism. This document is anti-union.
Friday, September 9th, 2011
TCT’s Purpose
TCT reader Nick asked me to explain our basic views. I thought I’d repost my answer, in case any other readers want to add their thoughts.
Here’s what I said, with a few additions and amendments:
Hi, Nick, and welcome to TCT. You ask excellent questions.
The immediate purpose of this blog is to show people how corporate planners (on behalf of the overclass of wealthy shareholders who remain the primary beneficiaries of big business) manipulate “free time” experiences and choices, and to demonstrate that corporate capitalism requires this manipulation, on an always-expanding basis.
The secondary purpose of this blog is to get people to think about how radically unsustainable this arrangement is, and to encourage movement toward a decent alternative. The work you are doing sounds vital. My only complaint about local solutions is that many of their architects tend to forget about the larger levels of reality. But that is certainly not a necessary part of making new local arrangements. And any adequate macro-level changes are certainly going to require radical reconstruction of our towns.
As for my objection to the way people talk about culture, those are of two kinds.
First, a great many supposedly radical thinkers begin from a sophomoric and unscientific definition of the word. Culture, properly defined, if the set of learned habits and behaviors prevailing among a population. As such, it is a very large-bore concept, close in scope to “society.” Meanwhile, many “cultural” theorists use it as a stand-in for one part of life only — free time, or personal life. Often, they shrink it even further to mean merely entertainment. In making that move, they build their attempts at explanation of reality on quicksand.
My more specific complaint about culture is that it is so often twinned with the bias-word “consumer,” to make the doubly stupid concept “consumer culture.” Social science (and the humanity and democracy it exists to serve) demands that its practitioners take care to make their concepts and data as free from bias and as descriptively valid and neutral as possible. To accept the word “consumer” as a valid equivalent for product-using human beings is to forgo the possibility of powerfully and accurately describing people’s product-related activities.
“Consumer” is a capitalist’s narrow view; nothing more, nothing less. It is a rank and destructive bias, poison to objective description of reality and its determinant institutions and processes. It is an ongoing tragedy that social science has swallowed it, without so much as a hiccup.
We live in a capitalist society and a capitalist culture. To choose to call it a consumer society and a consumer culture is to deny the cardinal facts and to confuse and insult the potential audience.
Jettisoning the word “consumer” is a first necessary step toward getting serious about describing humanity’s extremely dire crisis of economic waste and injustice.
The second step is to stop yammering hot air about culture, and to start examining and explaining the details of existing institutions and processes.
Alas, these both remain micro-ghetto endeavors, for a host of reasons.
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
Brixton’s Fuel: Politics Not “Consumerism”
I mentioned that Billy Bragg has attributed the ongoing British riots in part to “exclusion from consumerist society.” As TCTer Justin points out, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes this ridiculous diagnosis much farther, attributing the riots to the “non-shopping” of “defective consumers.”
Here is Bauman’s underlying claim about the nature of contemporary social life and social structure:
It is the level of our shopping activity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and improved” one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and the score in the life-success competition. To all problems we encounter on the road away from trouble and towards satisfaction we seek solutions in shops.
This confirms what I said in a comment on the prior Billy Bragg post: Those who swallow the “consumer” vocabulary have a license to make up the wildest bullshit. If you doubt that, consider the utter silliness of each of the bolded phrases from this supposedly emininent supposed sociologist. Not one of them is even a half-truth, yet Bauman presents them as if he were revealing the motor of history. Empirical evidence about what actually motivates people? No need for that! We have “consumerist society” incantations, which are true in and of themselves, by mere recitation.
The spread of such gibberish speaks volumes about the sorry state of what passes for a left/realist/progressive survivalist movement these days. As the mainstream media amplify the usual interpretation — verbalized by David Cameron, who attributes the events to “pockets of our society that are not just broken, but are frankly sick” [ed: Cameron is not thinking of capitalists here, despite the rather plain fit of his diagnosis to them] — Bauman simply papers over reality in the name of rote pseudo-explanation.
The fact is that these are not frustrated shoppers who have somehow had their Harrod’s charge plates retracted. These are young and poor and often non-white UK residents who are being forced to pay for the implosion of the Thatcherite supply-side capitalist orgy that is now meeting its own logical end in Britain and around the world, and which has always pissed on the poor and the average. The situation is well understood on the ground:
The welfare state is under a sustained assault. Each day brings news of ever more drastic government plans – privatisation of the health service, destruction of the benefit system, public services cut to pieces.
The politicians say it is because we’re in a financial mess. This is nonsense – public debt is no worse than at many times in the past. The rich are getting richer, the bankers once again paying themselves massive bonuses. Yet the rest of us are expected to give up our essential public services to pay their gambling debts.
The bankers’ crisis continues to cause mass job losses. But while numbers on welfare increase, the government is slashing benefits for the unemployed, sick and disabled, single parents and those on low wages. Anyone out of work is threatened with sanctions and workfare.
To justify this, the government paints benefit claimants as useless scroungers who have to be bullied to get a job.
The Manchester Guardian reports:
The biggest losers, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) said, are likely to be single people without children, those working more than 30 hours, those not in receipt of housing benefit, and households with savings of more than £16,000.
In other words: mostly young, working class people.
And, as Billy Bragg does note, the slashes are far deeper than mere dole reductions.
Meanwhile, the usual Tory mendacity has been gratuitously throwing salt into these wounds. PM Cameron’s depiction of the rioters as sick residents of mere social “pockets” is hardly a new phenomenon. As Britain’s economy has tanked and structural unemployment climbed, Cameron has all along portrayed the unemployed as shirkers. This, despite the well-known-in-Brixton fact that Cameron himself is about as thoroughly ensconced in inherited British upper class privilege as it is possible to be. As such, he has, of course, never himself done anything but “work” as a Conservative “researcher” and politician, with the usual in-between “gap years” and club outings.
Finally, a socio-political observer I trust deeply is actually in England at this very moment. His report:
I have probably less information than anybody else here about the exciting events elsewhere in Albion — haven’t been following the news reports closely at all. TV is as useless and mendacious here as it is in the States, and overheard conversations equally censorious, wrong-headed, and petty-bourgeois.
In other words, the stiff-lipped British overclass is roughly the same as our Yankee-Confederate one — just as deluded and ideologically high on its own fumes; just as powerful in the realm of communications; just as uninterested in, and thoroughly out of, answers.
Hence, it seems to me that the oppressed youth of Britain are merely taking the rather obvious next step. They are engaging in straightforward politics under the conditions they’ve been placed in.*
If only the youth of America could start making similar attempts to save themselves, and perhaps the rest of us in the bargain.
*Speaking of evidence:
Speaking to Reuters late on Tuesday, looters and other local people in east London pointed to the wealth gap as the underlying cause, also blaming what they saw as police prejudice and a host of recent scandals.
Spending cuts were now hitting the poorest hardest, they said, and after tales of politicians claiming excessive expenses, alleged police corruption and bankers getting rich it was their turn to take what they wanted.
“They set the example,” said one youth after riots in the London district of Hackney. “It’s time to loot.”
Friday, April 22nd, 2011
Retraction
I was too dismissive in that last post, as readers have said. John Michael Greer remains a highly astute and valuable analyst of ecology, as well as a source of good advice about how to plan for your personal adaptation to likely future events.
As a student of politics and society, I believe he has much work to do, and I would suggest that it is wise to take what he says about the social dimension of existing societies with extreme caution.
I also think it’s interesting that Greer thinks his theory that no power elite exists in the United States is a source of hope. The obvious follow-up question is what makes him think Americans will ever choose anything different, if everything we have has been freely and co-equally chosen all along? Cultures don’t make spontaneous leaps.
Personally, I think it’s not only simple realism to observe that we have been massively dominated by institutions owned by our elite, but the existence of this domination offers far more hope than does Greer’s mainstream consensus view of our history. Power structures and political policies are a lot easier to change than the way everybody thinks about the world (whatever that is).
Monday, January 17th, 2011
Quote for MLK Day
Given his religious commitments, MLK probably would not have said this in this way, had he somehow lived to be 82 in this nation of right-wing shooters. Still, I think the following quote sums up the situation, the day, and the ever-widening (and demoralizing) gulf between verbally celebrating MLK and the utterly heedless actions of our overclass and their political lapdogs, including the nation’s first black President. It also overlaps with MLK’s still under-appreciated denunciation of the Vietnam War and its long-standing imperial instigator. From the great James Keye:
Reality is that the earth is a summary of innumerable coincidences creating conditions of stability upon which life formed and now rides. The variations of life have had sufficient opportunity to produce an adaptation manifesting the most minutely possible principles of a new system of order riding on (or in if you like) a single species. The magnificence of this occurrence is beyond beyond. The functioning of this adaptation is problematic given the nature of its origin, and now it is a toss up as to whether the carrier species will discover how to manage such a powerful adaptation before its more dangerous expressions destabilize the conditions that allow it to exist.
