After the Future

The Elite Center of Gravity in the Democratic Party

Michael Lind nails it this morning:

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers — groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century. Take away the farmer-labor wing of the center-left, and you are left with upper-middle-class do-gooders like Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt. A progressivism based among college-educated professionals is going to be much more elitist, and perhaps much less egalitarian and effective, than one dominated by union leaders, urban bosses and agrarian politics. True, nonwhite and low-income Americans are important in the Democratic electorate — but they are grossly underrepresented in the organized center-left.

If there were a real progressive movement in the U.S., its attitude toward the professional class would be more skeptical than celebratory. In order to fund a decent-size welfare state, genuine progressives would demand higher taxes on Americans making more than $100,000 — or maybe more than $50,000 or even $30,000. Why not? Polls show that Americans are willing to pay somewhat higher taxes as long as they get better benefits like expansions of Social Security or Medicare. The pressure to exempt professional households that make between $100,000 and $250,000 a year is not coming from Middle America.

Genuine progressives would side with producers, of all kinds, against rentiers, of all kinds — including credential-rentiers like the members of professional monopoly guilds. If software can replace pricey lawyers, if moderately paid instructors can replace highly paid professors, if skilled nurses were allowed to do some of the things that only M.D.s now do at a fraction of the salary, the working-class majority would benefit immensely.

The proletarianization of the professional class should be welcomed and encouraged by the progressive movement. Already independent physicians are being replaced by doctors who are salaried employees of hospitals. Let prole lawyers work for legal services corporations and prole professors work for educational service companies. Unable to set their own incomes by means of guilds, many downwardly mobile professionals might belatedly discover the benefits of unions and legislation protecting workers against exploitation by managers and investors.

The bad news, then, is that the self-serving minority of credentialed professionals, rather than the majority of wage earners, is increasingly important in setting the agenda of the center-left. The good news is that the contradiction between progressive reform and the self-interest of the professional elite may come to an end as technology and economic reorganization eliminate the professions altogether.

This, in part, explains why Neoliberalism is embraced by so many Democrats. It is an ideology whose purpose is to sustain the interests of elites, and elites now define the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Nothing changes until the center of gravity in the party shifts back to labor. 

I don't know if I can get up much enthusiasm for the proletarianization of anybody, but if that's what it takes to get a coherent, broad-based pushback against the way the top wealth percentiles have rigged the system in their favor, then so be it. Wage slavery is wage slavery whether your collar is blue or white.

What kind of society do I want? Might as well lay it out here in broad strokes.

In the long run, ownership of companies has to shift away from the rentier class to workers on the Mondragon model or other variations of it.

I support state ownership for a few enterprises that serve the common good, like healthcare, energy, and transportation.

There should always be room for innovative, small startups, and that requires capital, but there are ways of raising it and rewarding investors without their owning the company indefinitely. 

A few thoughts about the future of education and the professoriate:

I'm fine with the public-private mix in education. K-12 public schools should get state and federal funding, but should be governed locally.

Tenure as we know it should be abolished in post-secondary education, but there should be mechanisms in place to insure due process for faculty who are fired. But class distinctions between tenured and non-tenure faculty should be abolished. The criteria for accountability should be developed in faculty senates, and it should be possible for the faculty senate to overturn unjust firings.  

I don't know what's going to happen to the large state research universities regarding undergraduate education.They will not much longer be able to justify the large, impersonal lecture classes in the MOOC era. My guess is that they'll downscale and become heavily subsidized centers for graduate education for engineers, biotech, healthcare professionals, and other science/technical professions. 

While they are not going away any time soon, I think Law School and MBA programs are  credentialing scams. There are far less expensive and more practical ways to train lawyers and business people. Certificate programs in specialized areas make more sense, but a lot of that could be handled by MOOCs.

I would like to see a continued place for small, liberal arts colleges for undergraduates, but how that will work economically I don't know. Perhaps as an extension of the K-12 system. I suspect that the elite schools will survive because of their endowments and because there will always be an elite willing to pay the freight, but I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be just MOOC educated. Maybe people want to discuss that in comments. 

Sawant on Boeing

“If Boeing executives want to leave the state, they are welcome to do that,” she told a cheering crowd at Town Hall Seattle in 2012. “The fact is, the workers are here. The factories are here. ... We are therefore calling for the democratic, public ownership by workers and by the community of the workplaces of the big corporations.”

The Seattle Times does a nice profile of Sawant in todays' paper.

But why does her worker ownership idea seem so far fetched?

It comes down to what I was saying a few weeks ago in relation to the ACA about how we frame things. We are so inured to companies' being run for the benefit of stockholders and their executives that the idea of a worker-owned company just seems outlandish and subversive, no matter how much sense it makes. 

But if ours was a truly sane and decent society, it should make no sense to us--indeed, we should recoil in collective horror--that Boeing can just lay off thousands of well-paid, skilled workers and leave a city because it can improve its margins elsewhere. We're not talking about Boeing's survival--just its profitability. 

In other words, what's insane is the frame. The most insane, indecent things seem sane within an insane frame. And that insane frame is economic Liberalism, whether in its classic 19th century form or in its current Neoliberal form. It doesn't work, if by working we mean provisioning a sane, decent society. If you don't believe me, ask the Pope.

I'm ambivalent about socialism providing an adequeately sane counterframe, but we need somebody to push back, and if the socialists are the only ones willing to do it, I'm with them.

Quote of the Day: David Graeber

What the 1% are is, effectively, a ruling class, they represent the point where concentrated wealth can be turned into political power. National politics in the US has been reduced to battles between different factions of that 1%. This is not just a traditional Marxist bourgeoisie though—and this is where I think it dovetails with the argument in debt—it represents the effects of financialization whereby more and more, economic value is not extracted indirectly, through the wage, but directly, through rents and more generally by what they used to call “political-jural extraction,” which I think was Perry Anderson’s term for feudalism. I’m not saying we’re reverting to feudalism quite, but something else in some ways analogous.

Whenever a surplus is extracted directly rather than indirectly, ideology also changes, since it’s much harder to disguise what’s really going on. Hence the neoliberal obsession, noted in the book, in preemptive attacks on anything that even looks like it’s an alternative. They’re barely even trying to convince anyone capitalism is a good system any more; just arguing that no other system is conceivable. (Source)

I am preparing a post, or perhaps a series of posts, on Neoliberalism, and I will lean heavily on David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years and David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. The goal is to understand how we let Neoliberalism and its financialization of reality become "normal". How we have come to accept market mechanisms in the economic sphere as normative, but have come more and more to accept that we live in a market society, as well, in which so many social, non-familial transactions are about interest rather than about mutual aid and support of one another's flourishing.

I have spent a lot of time talking here about the ongoing destructive effect of Neoliberal ideas in public education, but while acute there, the negative effects are more pervasive and broadly dehumanizing.  Of course, lots of people resist the Neoliberal world view and find it repugnant, but they're not the people running things. And the ambitious do not rise in this political economy unless they embrace it as normative.

Neoliberals and those who accept the Neoliberal order tend to think of what has happened to the political economy, especially in the last thirty years since the toppling of Keynes, as a reversion to the natural order, or that it's the inevitable consequence of globalization, that we must let 'nature' take its course, that there's no fighting it, and that all other alternatives are either naive or harmful. 

Then, if I have the time and energy, I want to spend some time reflecting on the Hayek/Polanyi polarity. The goal is not to polemicize but to understand the underlying assumptions, the metaphysics, so to say, of each thinker's world view. And also to bring into the discussion other thinkers who explore either side of this polarity. 

Wage Discipline

Why are wages are flat, unemployment high, and inflation stable despite the economic recovery? Because it benefits the so-called investor or rentier class:

But capitalists are always fighting a two-front war in democracies, against workers and against their representatives in the government, who might begin to change the social framework to give workers more bargaining power. Capitalism is predicated on the asymmetries of power, on capital’s ability to compel workers to sell their labor power. Capitalists must fight anything that threatens that imbalance, regardless of whether it leads to an aggregate increase of social wealth or even improves their individual profits. . . .

Not to be too functionalist about it, but it often seems like a good idea to work backward from the need for labor discipline to understand certain vagaries of economic policy; at the level of policy and not individual firms, class struggle and getting leverage over workers matters more than efficiency or profit or even growth. (Source)

In other words it's all about developing and maintaining a set of power arrangements that give the rentiers the upper hand in all conflicts with the majority, i.e., everybody who is not them--the 99%. 

I believe that the behavior of the 1% is more fear motivated than greed motivated. Ever wonder why wealthy elites see themselves as victims? It's not because they are; it's because they fear they will be. They see themselves as an embattled minority in which the majority hates them. They live, whether consciously or unconsciously, in a world in which they know what goes around comes around, and if people they have kept down get the chance, they will reciprocate. I think the same kind of psychology infects white people, especially in the Southwest, who are freaked out by Mexicans. They know the history, and they believe that If Mexicans eventually get the upper hand politically, they will treat white people exactly as the white people treated them. Same psychology governs the thinking of the Rick Santelli types who speak for the 1%--if they give workers the upper hand, they will treat them as they treated the workers.  And people whose brains are soaked in adrenaline are simply not people you can talk sense to. That's not the whole story, but I'd argue that's a big part of it. 

There are two things that wealthy elites fear more than anything: First, because they are such a minuscule minority in a democracy, they fear that the majority will use the political process to expropriate their wealth through "confiscatory" taxes or other redistribution schemes. Second, they fear any kind of movement to organize ordinary people that will empower them politically or in labor negotiations, because they fear it gives them the means to realize their first fear. Even if such empowerment movements are sane and reasonable, even if they would lead to greater profits and broader wealth, they feverishly envision in such movements a future with the san culottes running amok in the streets of Paris.

Either wealthy elites don't realize that workers can be bought off, as they were during the post WWII period (workers as a group don't want power; they just want to live comfortably), or they look at their aggressive attempts to destroy unions and other empowerment movements as a long-range strategy. It's a field positions game. Pin the workers near their own goal line, and make them fight for every inch when they finally organize to push back. Why buy them off now if they only have to do it in an emergency?  

So two political objectives follow from this: First, push hard and don't give an inch on taxes. It's not about greed; it's about power and doing what is required to maintain one's position at the top of the pyramid. The best offense is a good offense, because once things shift and the elites are on their heels, then it's over. Or so they fear. Second, do whatever it takes to keep the "mob" confused, divided, and feuding among themselves. Tell big lies. Work the patriotism angle. Use wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, and immigration, to keep cosmopolitan workers hating traditionalist workers. Use the 'no-i'm-not-you-are tactic' to keep the uniformed disoriented. Any time anyone defending the interests of the investor or rentier class accuses those who oppose them of class warfare (or racism, fascism, or corruption, or whatever), you can be sure they are describing their own program, and want to deflect the public's attention away from it. 

This confusion is promoted in various ways, for instance In the very effective way it has coopted populist resentments a la Glen Beck and the Tea Party. In other cases it's not unlike the way Southern oligarchs kept poor whites from ever seeing how they had more to gain in joining with poor blacks to organize economically and politically to break up the oligarchy that oppressed them both. It's in this sense that American politics have been southernized, but it's a strategy that is as old as there have been pyramidal social systems.

I heard someone say the other day that autocracy and oppression don't need to be explained: it's the historical norm. It's rather freedom and self rule that need to be explained. The iron rule of oligarchy is the norm once humans move out of hunter gatherer societies; everything else is the exception. 

People who have a pathological need for power do whatever is necessary in the game of thrones to get it, and normal people who just want to live modest, decent lives let them because they just don't care enough to fight them. The question we have to face is whether we are now in the process of reverting to the historical norm, and because we're living off the fumes of the exceptional period since WWII, we haven't realized it yet. But a part of me is still optimistic that we will figure this out, that we will learn how new information technologies have empowered us to organize push back. But as I've argued here frequently over the last several years, nothing happens until the cultural left and the cultural right understand that they have the same enemy. 

Being in the Grip of Compulsions We Don't Understand

I have been getting this feeling lately about the big historical sweep of things and of our individual seemingly insignificant part to play in it. It’s a feeling of how mostly things don’t change, and yet how they do, how greed and powerlust seem to be in the driver’s seat, and yet that they are not the whole story, how everything seems to point to an undesirable outcome, but that there is always enough to point to that gives one reason for hope.

I've come to believe that a sign of the people who are living well is that their lives are a kind of wandering in the wilderness, of being neither here nor there, of being satisfied with their daily manna allotment, which is just enough to keep them alive and moving. The great intoxications are not for such wanderers; for them it's always just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and of doing what is required of them on that day and in that place.

We’re at a point in history now where it seems that things will play out the way they will play out. There’s not a lot the wandering folk can do, except what is in front of them to do. The world is in the grip of people who are driven by compulsions they don’t understand, and their compulsions are the root cause of so much needless suffering--for themselves and others. I can rant all I want about the stupidity and selfishness of so much of it, but it’s always been this way. Anything else has been the exception.

The world has always been driven by a quest for the great intoxication. Is it really about money and power, or is it about the momentary states of intoxication that come with their acquisition. And enough is never enough because the intoxication is momentary, and life without it is so empty and drab, and so like addicts in desperate need of a fix, they are compelled to get more power and more wealth, not for there own sake, but as a means to an end, and there is never an end to it.

That's what motivates the great ones, and the rest of us settle for the little intoxications that likewise never satisfy, hedonic adaptation and all that, so we look for love in all the wrong places, play our little ego games at work or in relationships, and in general muck things up because we are in the grip of compulsions we do not understand. 

***

It's more complicated, of course, because the intoxication isn't the problem so much as the compulsive need for it. The problems do not lie so much in being in the state of intoxication itself, but rather in the way people behave when they are not in it. I recently watched The Hustler and The Color of Money--both great films about phenomenally talented pool players played by Paul Newman and Tom Cruise--and they're a study in what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow". When they're in it they believe they are invincible, and often they are. At one point in The Hustler, the Newman character, Fast Eddie says to his girlfriend:

Fast Eddie: . . .When I'm goin', I mean, when I'm REALLY goin' I feel like a... like a jockey must feel. He's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him... he's comin' into the stretch, the pressure's on 'im, and he KNOWS... just feels... when to let it go and how much. Cause he's got everything workin' for 'im: timing, touch. It's a great feeling, boy, it's a real great feeling when you're right and you KNOW you're right. It's like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue's part of me. You know, it's uh - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood, it's got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don't have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. I can play that game the way... NOBODY'S ever played it before.

Sarah: You're not a loser, Eddie, you're a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything. 

Was this the feeling that Homer’s Greek heroes had? Eddie's jockey-on-a-horse reference brings to mind the theme explored in Peter Shaffer's Equus.

Whatever the source or cause of experiences like these, they are like being possessed by a god because when in a flow state one operates on a level that transcends one’s ordinary level of talent. As with Homer's heroes, the difference between the good and the great is this capability to move into this other dimension when one is taken hold of by the god. I’ve sniffed it now and then, enough to know what it must be like, but never in a way that led me to have any impact. And it's probably just as well. I'm sure I would have become an addict. 

Because if being in the flow is mostly a positive experience, the problem for people who experience its intensity lies in its becoming addictive. When they are not in it, the only important thing is that they get back into it. And sometimes when they are playing they're not in the flow, and they lose, but they think it's just a matter of time before they get back into it. I imagine something like this happens to gamblers who once had a lucky streak and continuously seek the elation it brought them losing untold sums in the quest, thinking they will win it back when their "luck" returns, i.e., when the god once again deigns to lift him above other mortals.

Both the Newman and Cruise characters, who have this experience of being in the flow, are rather guileless and uncalculating--at least in the beginning. The important thing is for them to be in that state, whatever name they give it; it's not really about the money--the money is important for the people around them, their stakeholders, and the stakeholders are continuously frustrated by their players because they have no interest in the hustle game. There is no payoff for these players in the hustle. Making money does not give them the intoxication that they crave; they want that feeling, to be in that intoxicating state of invincibility that comes with being in the flow.

And when they lose, no matter how badly, they think it's just a matter of time before they get back to it, and when they do, all will be well. And they will win back all they have lost. It's just a matter of having enough time and the money to stay in the game.

Isn't this what we are seeing on Wall Street. The big players there are intoxication addicts.They see themselves as invincible. If things have gone south, it's only temporary. Sooner or later they'll be back in the flow. Look--isn't the stock market at an all-time high? They are winners, and the rest of us should trust them, and rely on them as the Achaeans did Achilles. 

Chris Hedges on the Chicago Teachers' Strike

 

Hedges points to the obvious, but it's not something you hear discussed a lot: This is Obama's guy, Rahm Emmanuel, taking on the teachers' union. It tells you precisely where the Democrats are in relationship to what used to be their base. In the same way mainstream Democrats have supported and in some cases made worse the Bush-era erosion of civil liberties and the strengthening of the surveillance state, we see it here continuing the Reagan legacy of anti-unionism. 

 

Video of the Day: Jamie Vollmer

Next time you hear someone say schools should be run like a business, show them this video:

 

 For more of this talk, here's the link.