Thursday, March 25, 2010

Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story"

My feeling about Moore is typically very contextual. On the one hand, he's obviously not as rigorous in his use of facts as he should be and his theoretical lens is quite flimsy. On the other hand, he is excellent at finding clear illustrations of his point which, even if you don't agree with the point, are a rare space in US culture where these illustrations are even broached. For instance, in Sicko, while his use of Canada, the UK and France (not to mention Cuba) as examples of well run health care programs are likely quite partial and exaggerated; the nuances of each system would likely find places they could be repaired or altered not to mention the people who probably virulently despise them. But it is striking that, in the US conversation about Health Care, there are so few moments when this illustration is made--when even the mention of the fact that every other industrialized world has some system of nationally providing or enabling the provision of health care in a social democratic way. I don't mean people just casually mentioning it as some abstract external category: I mean people using the dominant forms of the visual media to communicate examples of these experiences in anything approaching a coherent, comprehensive, or balanced way. The fact that he has to resort to buffoonish tactics to keep the movie entertaining may be both a plus and a minus--in general, I think it would be better for him to direct a more attractive, less annoying person to do this, but I guess it's part of his blue collar agitation shtick to be fairly unconcerned with appearances. So yes, on one level I find Moore a complete buffoon; on the other hand, it shows the deep impoverishment of our culture that it takes an utter buffoon to make what are clearly relevant points using visual media such as film in a widely distributed fashion. It's like taking a class where there is an annoying almost intolerable student who nonetheless asks the kinds of questions and poses the kinds of dilemmas which should animate any classroom setting--yet which would otherwise be completely absent from the discussion.

I feel roughly the same way about Moore's analysis in his most recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story. Many of his points are sloppy and oversimplified--and his misplaced faith in Obama and the popular agitation of late 2008 is almost unforgivable--but he still represents one of the few voices that actually attempts to articulate a full throated critique of the current economic system. True there are people like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and the late Howard Zinn among public intellectuals who might critique this system: likewise the new generation of critics of the food system--people like Michael Pollin. But Pollin has ambivalent resonance in US culture (it is easy to opt for a gated community of organic food to protect yourself from these evils--or to think you are) and the others are mainly marginal to US culture. They are great resources for the left, but for the most part there are much better resources for actual theory and history; they preach to the already curious. Nader is even more polarizing and in the current circumstances it is unclear how productive his interventions are. Moore, on the other hand, buffoon that he is, can get media attention to his cause and does a decent job of making the critique of capitalism something that is a little cathartic rather than just a downward spiral of endless bad news. Of course the catharsis is an illusion, but without some utopian impulse it is hard to imagine anyone standing up to the system he discusses.

As to this discussion, he is very vague on capitalism per se. He celebrates the post-war economy which was most assuredly capitalist, even if it was less brutal than the current situation. And he is characteristically moralistic and melodramatic in talking about both the people who benefit from the current system and those who are hurt by it. On the other hand, he provides some clear evidence to support the validity of this convention (a memo from Citigroup analogous with the recommendations of the trilateral commission; people put out of their homes by refinance schemes with variable interest rates; a juvenile detention facility that, after being privatized, bribed judges to raise incarceration rates.) And if nothing else he begins to illustrate again what many mainstream outlets refuse to contemplate, namely the claim he begins making early on that capitalism itself is the problem and it can't be regulated. (He calls it "evil" multiple times and gets several interlocutors to agree with this contention.) It is an extreme position, but one that has gotten no play at all in the current discussion: the claims that we are moving toward socialism make an actual discussion of what is capitalist about the current situation almost impossible. Perhaps even more helpful--and less discussed--are his visual representation of the kinds of long term economic indexes that are more relevant to the current situation of the average US citizen than the incessant discussions of fluctuations in the Dow: namely, the changes in the productivity numbers vs. stagnant wages; change in the percentage of household indebtedness; and change in the ratio of wages for average workers vs. CEOs. These three indexes are intricately related to the basic failure of the current model--which is why they are so rarely discussed in depth as problems to solve, much less as problems that were directly caused by certain regimes of policy and ideology or by the capitalist system itself.

Moore brings up this impossible line of inquiry, even if he is sloppy and sentimental in doing so. I could chide him for doing this, but it makes no sense to criticize someone for being less than ideal when there is no one else even close. I wouldn't say he's some sort of national treasure or anything (I reserve that designation for John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who are perhaps the two administrators of a much more regular space of criticism); but he is an index of both what our national conversation could look like in its range and its fundamental failure: if it is up to Michael Moore to say this stuff, we really have a problem. As egotistical as I think he is, I can't help but think he'd agree on some level.


Farmer's Branch rental ordinance shot down by Feds

I'm sure that there could be some adverse effects of immigrants living in your neighborhood, but I doubt the people who would find this a problem would be at all charmed by their actual immigration status: xenophobia is pretty much equal opportunity and will apply to brown people whether the have a green card or not. Even from your statement that "immigrants drive neighborhoods down" I can't parse what part of this is in reference to identifiable indexes like assessments of home values (which are also subjective no matter what entity is carrying them out) or just to some perceived impurity moving into the neighborhood. When you say things like this, ask yourself if you'd feel illegal immigrants from Australia, Germany, or the UK "drive neighborhoods down." In Britain, for instance, it is far more likely that there will be illegal immigrants from Australia, and that the average person from Pakistan in the UK is there legally--maybe even born there: the perception is that illegal immigration is a Brown menace when it is, in practice, largely White.

If it is really the fact of their illegality, then the country of origin shouldn't matter. I sympathize with whatever perceived injustice you feel (the preschool thing is definitely problematic--though it seems like the answer would be to expand the program so your kids could go rather than eliminating the participation of immigrants legal or otherwise), but I also can't help but think you're basically trying to rationalize a set of anxious racial biases. It's fine if you have these and I'm sure you have your reasons for feeling them: but don't try to make them objective indexes for social policy.

The constitutionality issue has to do with who has the authority to enforce the law. This is a form of vigilantism--vigilantism that is carried out by a local government, sure, but vigilantism nonetheless. True there may be a problem with illegal immigration but there are also many problems with legal immigration. In that sense, I would be very interested to know if either of you could explain the procedure (and cost in legal fees) of obtaining a legal immigration visa from Mexico or Central America. I ask because in an attempt to discuss how complicated it was, I tried to find said information, but it seems spread out over many webpages between the ICE, State Dept. and different US embassies. The closest I can come is this list of possible visas--though I'd note that the actual visa you'd need to get in from Mexico is not on this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_visas

And in most of the cases where you can get a work visa, you need to have your employer in the US help you file the visa--in other words, you'd already have to have the job here to even apply for the visa--and your visa status would depend on you staying with that employer. (note also that it is a $1500 fee just to get the visa and in most cases, to get even a STUDENT visa approved [muchless a work visa] you'd have to prove that you had a certain amount of money in the bank--usually about US$25K: any sense of the class of immigrants we're talking about here?)

http://mexico.usembassy.gov/eng/evisas_work.html

In this sense it's worth noting that many of the currently "illegal" immigrants came in with visas but then overstayed them when they expired or were unable to get them renewed. That's just one kind of visa: immigration is far more difficult (i.e. when you apply for a green card or naturalization). But many of the temporary workers are unlikely to want to immigrate forever--they just want to work here temporarily, contribute to our economy, and go home (or at least that was the way it was: On this I'd also note that, before the border was militarized and the policies of border crossing more stringent, there was far more possibility of an immigrant only coming here for two or three years tops, then returning home once they'd made a little money. Now it is far more likely that, once they get here, they are afraid to leave because they don't think they'll be able to come back if need be.) Our current policy is set up so that it is increasingly difficult to get a temporary work visa--and since we've already pushed the practice into informal (and illegal) channels, it's unlikely that we could dig it out without a very public concerted effort on par with the 1950s Bracero program. Even then we generally lack the personnel to do this in a timely manner: people want to get a job and get working as fast as possible. They don't want to wait for three years for the privilege of mowing lawns and washing dishes.

If you were coming to the country to live with your cousin and wash dishes for a few months at a restaurant where he already worked, what do you think is the likelihood that you'd go through these processes? What's the likelihood that the employer was so interested in getting a new dishwasher that he'd help you with that visa? That you'd have $1500 fee and $25K in the bank? What if you tried to get a visa and were rejected? What if you had no other way to make the kind of money you needed in you village in Mexico because NAFTA had decimated your local industries or because the "War on Drugs" had empowered a violent mafia to make your life miserable: would you let your family starve just to honor US law? Would you flinch if you had to find a fake set of papers in order to rent a house in Farmer's Branch? Maybe I'm wrong and it is far easier to get here legally, but if that's the case, it isn't very easy to find out how to do that. Maybe you have a better sense of this than me, but I have never gotten the sense from anyone who's had to deal with the INS or ICE that it is a straightforward process.

In any case, the economy is doing a far better job of keeping immigrants away than the Farmer's Branch city council. Last year there was a 22% decline in the number of people leaving Mexico and that number is likely to be even lower this year (though it could rise because of the pressure the US has put on the Mexican government to fight its drug war, an increasingly violent proposition.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803429.html

You can rest assured that if the tea partiers agenda of the complete abandonment of a true government supported jobs program is enacted, the collapse of the economy will send all those nasty immigrants packing: its sort of like shooting yourself in the foot, but at least you won't have to worry about renters in Farmer's Branch.

For the record, learning to speak Spanish would, indeed, be a good idea in general: more people speak Spanish in the word than English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

Friedman bloviates

Commenting on the passage of the Health Care bill, Friedman tries to make the necessary conservative framing of our current political environment a boon (though one he thinks he's coming up with on his own [asshat]):

That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.

I think this is pretty much what Walter Lippmann recommended in the early 20th century--a democracy governed by experts rather than people. But the end result of this is all the lobbyists and interest groups do their best to present their position not as "interested" but as the objectively better position for everyone (i.e. hegemonic common sense.) Dewey recognized the problem of this and instead recommended that the government be charged with expanding education and access to information such that more people would be informed and reach a more enlightened conclusion about what needed to happen. But this, too, can get hijacked.

In any case, the only way that Friedman--or Cass Sunstein and his pal Obama--can recommend something like the radical center (or as Mark Satin called it the Radical Middle http://www.amazon.com/dp/0813341906/) is if we already agree not only on how to accomplish the goal, but on what principles and ideals we should try to accomplish. All Friedman seems to do here is throw together a bunch of policy angles that would appeal to a variety of already centrist constituencies. The actual balance between them and how they are regulated and measured after the fact are devilish details in themselves; but when you have people who, for instance, want to abolish public schools altogether (or who would oversee their destruction if it seemed politically viable--like the current education secretary) then it is evident that all the talk about raising standards and increasing accountability is in no way an honest approach to reforming education: it is just ideological cover for privatization.

In other words, there is no true balance here, just ceding the center to the right (which, in my opinion, is one of Friedman's most often executed moves). If the "radical center" of health care reform is to have "market reforms" to keep costs down, then you've already given up the basic ground of the struggle--namely, should health care be a commodity regulated by the free market, for profit corporations instead of a public good overseen by public institutions; likewise, if reforming energy is limited to offshore drilling while we build more nuclear power plants, it is difficult to see what's centrist about this: all it does is adopt the rhetoric of the environmental movement to give cover to the expansion of two industries counter to its very principles. I have no faith that the people who want to have offshore drilling and nuclear power have any interest in either energy independence or any environmental purpose--and it shows zero creativity on Friedman's part to limit our options in this way.

All I think this proves is that the left is so disempowered and illegitimate in US culture that, in order to have even a half measure of rational public policy (i.e. in order to allow the government to do anything at all) they must be ready to concede 90% of the principles behind the policies they would support. And in the current congress, I have complete confidence that 90% of those in the Democratic party would gladly concede this since they never held those principles all that strongly to begin with. I suppose the same argument could be made of certain GOP senators as well, but they appear this way only in relation to a much more active, visible base (and one animated for political purposes to make the current administration appear as fascists so Republicans can ride in on a horse of freedom--a strategy that will likely backfire if they win the 2010 midterms). The recent democratic bill is basically a plan taken wholesale from a republican plan of five years ago, yet current republicans refuse to support it because now even that is too leftist. In that sense, even the "radical center" proposal of abandoning all principles on the left (public option, support for abortion rights, etc.) is pragmatically unacceptable to the minority party--a party who is drumming up animosity with the hopes that it will win them political points. The democrats are rightfully unafraid of abandoning their principles since they will obviously face no political repercussions for doing so: winning is enough, no matter what the prize.

Friedman is as much a symptom as a booster of this set of circumstances. Is he not basically a product of Clinton's instantiation of Gidden's "Third Way" with "American characteristics?" Globalization, Lexus and the Olive Tree and all that? And are we not immersed in a crisis that has been facilitated by that very package of policies? Then how is returning to that "radical center" going to help us out of it? If we begin from the premise that there is nothing valid in the radical left and anything that was previously a liberal left version of social democracy is still too far to that side (where merely raising taxes is "socialism") the idea of the radical center is only radical in its elision of any actual options for change. Calling for a radical center is just a kind of journalistic pablum meant to create balance by blaming both sides equally rather than actually engaging with ideas and arguments on an objective plane of rational political judgement. (Though I think Friedman has famously proven he can't be trusted to engage in this--not because he's shifty, but because he's a buffoon: http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html )

The fact is that the center has shifted so far to the right that to ask for a radical commitment to it on even these pragmatic principles means obscuring not only the causes of the crisis, but the radical potential for reform and realignment that should be produced by the crisis. I think the Health Care bill is clear evidence of where the radical center leads us and I don't think it is a path we should be taking. On the other hand, it seems to be the path we're on already, which makes Friedman just a Monday morning quarterback.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

New Left and the (next) new conjuncture.

Just finished reading Hall's account of what he calls the "first new left" (and the first "New Left Review" which is to say the NLR before Perry Anderson took over.) I am struck by several things but most centrally, I notice a certain amount of anxiety about how a socialist movement can arise in the midst of basic material affluence. Pace,

We also challenged the prevailing view that the so-called affluent society would of itself erode the appeal of socialist propaganda—that socialism could arise only out of immiseration and degradation. Our emphasis on people taking action for themselves, ‘building socialism from below’ and ‘in the here and now’, not waiting for some abstract Revolution to transform everything in the twinkling of an eye, proved, in the light of the re-emergence of these themes after 1968, strikingly prefigurative.

In other words, the orthodox Marxist claim that the only thing that might help push the revolution along was a dramatic material change seemed like an unlikely engine for social change at the time . As he says elsewhere in the article, "socialism was a conscious democratic movement and socialists were made, not born or given by the inevitable laws of history or the objective processes of the mode of production alone." On the one hand, the politics this inspired were quite important--in ways that I've not before heard. He writes of project of creating NLR clubs around Britain in order to engage people "where they were" and get conversations going about socialism, etc. They weren't alone, of course, in doing this and it's not entirely contextualized, but there is a real attention to politically engaging "the people" and getting them interested in these ideas and their importance for social change. In practice, this meant opening the conversations more and getting people engaged in the discussion rather than giving a top down proscription of what the discussion should look like--or such was Hall's ideal. While he draws a distinction between himself and Thompson earlier in the essay, by the end it is clear that, in terms of how he understood socialist activism at the time, he was also deeply inspired by Thompson's work on William Morris (presaging his work in Making of the Working Class). He quotes from his editorial in the first issue of NLR:

We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and—as Morris said—make socialists there. We have come through 200 years of capitalism and 100 years of imperialism. Why should people—naturally—turn to socialism? There is no law which says that the Labour Movement, like a great inhuman engine, is going to throb its way into socialism or that we can, any longer . . . rely upon poverty and exploitation to drive people, like blind animals, towards socialism. Socialism is, and will remain, an active faith in a new society, to which we turn as conscious, thinking human beings. People have to be confronted with experience, called to the ‘society of equals’, not because they have never had it so bad, but because the ‘society of equals’ is better than the best soft-selling consumer capitalist society, and life is something lived, not something one passes through like tea through a strainer.
Two things are evident in this--as in the rest of the essay--which gives what I think is great insight into what the Thompson and Hall agreed on in this movement. One is that they are connecting their struggle to a much longer one (interpreted through the lens of Thompson's historical account of Morris). And in so doing they prized the democratic process of "populist" discussion above having a clear set of political and theoretical principles which they would address to the people. According to Hall, it was actually the inability to operate a journal in this context--"the editorial board the fear that a journal of ideas could not be effectively run by committees"--which ultimately led him to resign as editor. This is, I think, a telling foible of Hall's--though perhaps one of the more forgivable ones: namely that he prized process over the content of the ideas. At the time, this was a very sensible principle (as he demonstrates by contextualizing it in relation to the left factions vying for control over the dominant narrative.) However, as time went on, it seems to have become a serious liability. His discussion of the CND campaign and the way it became an articulated struggle spanning lines of class and social status is obviously included as a nod to--if not refracted as a memory through--the more prominent understanding of socialist politics adopted at the time he was writing (in 1988) LaClau and Mouffe's hegemony and socialist strategy. (I'll return to this below--especially to LaClau's own more recent idea of how you need to "construct a people."

On the other hand, Anderson's more vigorous approach to making it a serious journal of ideas provides the flipside of this problem: as happy as I am in retrospect that it became such a muscular exercise in theoretical and political discourse (alongside Verso and its earlier iteration New Left Books) it is clear that this divergence made it impossible to carry on with the political engagement that Hall discusses so enthusiastically above--"We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and—as Morris said—make socialists there."

more here

But equally visible is the reason behind two dominant themes that emerge from this moment--often seen as being opposed in discussions of the New Left and nascent Cultural Studies, but here clearly of a piece with their historical moment. In Hall's description of the need for a new approach at the time, he notes the importance of socialist humanism and the problem of talking about the role that culture was playing in keeping people from thinking about the problems of capitalism. Alienation on the one hand, was a good way of framing this--and the emphasis on "directly living" one's conditions and being active in their creation seems to be the principle that Thompson wants to recommend for getting the people active again. This was needed because, as Hall says, the labor movement had been hijacked to a certain extent by the dominant corporate capitalism. People, in other words, were materially more well off than they had been before. The only appeal from the socialist front had to be the resurrection of some primal sense of anomie at how, despite material comfort, there was less control over the realm of representations and less creativity possible both there and in the workplace (hence the importance of Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital as Denning mentioned recently alongside Althusser and Thompson.) Alienation, in this regard, was a strategicly chosen line of critique, admittedly elaborated most fully in the line of the Post-Frankfurt school critic Herbert Marcuse. And, to be sure, much of this was already prefigured (though in much more dour German tones) in the interwar Frankfurt School critique of culture industry and state capitalism.

On the other hand, Althusser was focused less on the stimulation of agency and more on the rigorous elaboration of a theoretical paradigm fit for this new age. In effect, he was not all that interested in the possibility that the economic realm would ever be undermined again--that class consciousness per se would not become prominent because of a direct material change in circumstances. The remoteness of the economy's power (in the last instance), though it was still too close for the critics of economism, shifted the focus to the way the cultural realm was able to secure and reproduce the system despite the remaining inequality and oppression at its heart.

As a tangent, it is worth noting that the economic reinterpretation of Althusser--by what Alain Lepietz calls "the rebel sons of Althusser"--of Regulationist Economics...

In all these sets of ideas, the presumption is that the economic system will remain as it was--that class as a directly experienced difference in relation to either the mode of production or the realities of distribution and opportunity would, for the forseeable future, be less salient than people's feeling of alienation in relation to "the spectacle."

Not entirely true, Jessop (regulationist) vs. hall.

still, worth noting that the fact that the decline of our alienation in relation to the spectacle (i.e. Jenkins) corresponds to the moment when class power is more pronounced than at any time in the 20th century--or at least the second half. In this, the curious fact is that the movement remains unemergent, making Cultural Studies questions all the more urgent even as they realize that one of the basic premises was fundamentally incorrect.

Harvey on class power of neo-liberalism.

“To live under neo-liberalism also means to accept or submit to that liberal bundle of rights necessary for capital accumulation. We live, therefore, in a society in which the inalienable rights of individuals (and, recall, corporations are defined as individuals before the law) to private property and the profit rate trump any other conception of inalienable rights you can think of. Defenders of this regime of rights plausibly argue that it encourages "bourgeois virtues," without which everyone in the world would be far worse off. These include individual responsibility and liability, independence from state interference (which often places this regime of rights in severe opposition to those defined within the state), equality of opportunity in the market and before the law, rewards for initiative and entrepreneurial endeavors, care for oneself and one's own, and an open market place that allows for wide-ranging freedoms of choice of both contract and exchange. This system of rights appears even more persuasive when extended to the right of private property in one's own body (which underpins the right of the person to freely contract to sell his or her labor power as well as to be treated with dignity and respect and to be free from bodily coercions such as slavery) and the right to freedom of thought, of expression and of speech. Let us admit it: these derivative rights are appealing. Many of us rely heavily upon them. But we do so much as beggars live off the crumbs from the rich man's table. Let me explain

“I cannot convince anyone by philosophical argument that the neo-liberal regime of rights is unjust. But the objection to this regime of rights is quite simple: to accept it is to accept that we have no alternative except to live under a regime of endless capital accumulation and economic, growth no matter what the social, ecological or political consequences. Reciprocally, endless capital accumulation implies that the neo-liberal regime of rights must be geographically expanded across the globe by violence (as in Chile and Iraq), by imperialist practices (such as those the World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank) or through primitive accumulation (as in China and Russia) if necessary. By hook or by crook, the inalienable rights of private property and the' profit rate will he universally established. This is precisely what Bush means when he says the US dedicates itself to extend the sphere of liberty and freedom across the globe.

“But these are not the only set of rights available to us. Even within the liberal conception as laid out in the UN Charter there are derivative fights such as freedoms of speech and expression, of education and economic security, rights to organize unions, and the like. Enforcing these rights would have posed a serious challenge to the hegemonic practices of neo-liberalism. Making these derivative rights primary and the primary right of private property and the profit rate derivative would entail a revolution in political-economic practices of great significance. There are also entirely different conceptions of rights to which we may appeal—of access to the global commons or to basic food security, for example. ‘Between equal rights force decides’ and political struggles over the proper conception of rights moves center stage to how possibilities and alternatives get represented, articulated and eventually born forward into transformative political-economic practices. The point, as Bartholomew and Breakspear argue, ‘is to recuperate human rights politics as part of a critical cosmopolitan project aimed explicitly against imperialism’ and, I would add, neo-liberalism itself” (56-57).

here more on the issue of rights and the state, culture process etc.