futility work

Even before traffic stopped on the freeway on the drive up to Sacramento on Friday afternoon, I was in a funk. The entire route I could see nothing but the detritus of industrial capitalism, which is to say, the world in which we all live. I was thinking about all the concrete and steel everywhere, not only around me but worldwide. Not only is so much of the world built by industrial capitalism ugly, it’s been built by ruthlessly exploiting resources and labor. 

I suppose the horrible effects of industrial capitalism are familiar. We have lived our whole lives steeped in pollution, poison, and garbage. No one really has to read Marx to understand that working people are exploited. All of that is plain to anyone who just looks around and thinks. 

At times, what upsets me most is the futility of it. In that mood, when I consider what I do for a living, what it enables other people to do for a living, and how our lives intertwine socially and productively, none of it seems worthwhile. Some students of mine have told me that my classes have deeply changed their outlooks on the world, and that they feel benefitted by this. I appreciate that, but then I am sometimes struck by the fact that all of us are forced to live by means of the monstrous enterprise, and having a changed outlook on it does not seem helpful. Some faculty I have represented have told me that they were grateful I helped them through whatever jam they were in at the university. But my help is a way of assuring that they can continue to function in a system that destroys. 

I come to believe that people are committed irrevocably to a life of plunder, rushing to consume more, with the only possible end result making the world uninhabitable. I become suspicious of pleasure, not out of guilt but on the basis of understanding that our pleasures are disastrous. I think of the unfathomable quantities of liquor or cotton or paper we produce, how wide spread they are, how they are made, and what they ultimately do for us. It’s as if we have a psychotic notion that if we produce and consume ever more, we or our species will survive forever. 

Even if that were true, the logic of this form of civilization commands that our survival is at the expense of the planet as well as ourselves. We somehow trick ourselves into believing otherwise, but still have no way to respond to the question: what for? After all, it makes just as much sense to conclude that the ultimate goal of industrial capitalism is to make me stuck in traffic.

w(h)ither liberalism?

The work of Michel Foucault has had a deep impact on theorizing in gender studies, queer theory, critical disability studies, and other critical theoretical investigations of the production of certain types of embodiment. In particular, Foucault’s work on discipline, surveillance, power-knowledge, and biopower remain current in academic publication. Even when Foucault’s way of working or his analysis is criticized, the basic conceptual frameworks he developed in books like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality continue to underlie and underwrite critical theoretical investigations.

What is usually left behind is Foucault’s insistence on periodization in the production of power-knowledge. This theme, most prominently examined in Foucault’s pre-genealogical, transitional work The Order of Things, should caution us to resist positivist impulses to totalize any theory. In the game of academic publication, the posture of positivist totalization is a significant display of dominance, so it continues.
 
In so far as the theorist is dissatisfied with every partial truth, the theorist should interrogate the way that a given theory appears true—under what historical and political conditions, under what episteme (remember those?), under what regime. When times change, the ground shifts, and with it eventually the groundwork of theoretical knowledge.¹ And times have changed.
 
Foucault explored the births of the clinic, the prison, and sexuality. They share a general historical-political context, which in all cases coincides with the development of bourgeois industrial capitalism. To my knowledge, Foucault did not write anything about the development of capitalism that would parallel his theorizing about the clinic, the prison, and sexuality. My guess is that this was because of academic politics of the day, but an interesting thought would be that it is because capitalism was too base for Foucault’s theoretical tastes or capacity. In any case, these are all contemporaries, age peers.²
 
The basic set-up of capitalism has changed a great deal, even since Foucault’s death. Multinational corporations have overtaken the capacity of any state to control them, and the state and all institutions are being broken down, restructured and rebuilt through the auspices of corporations. Among the institutions undergoing this radical change are the clinic, the prison, and sexuality—and also identity, language, music.
 
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality both rely on a notion of the individual as the site of power-knowledge, produced through the construction of subjectivity, self-consciousness (a word Foucault eschewed), and self-identity. The Panopticon relentlessly called upon the prisoner to attend to himself as prisoner, to become penitent, and eventually to become productive citizen. For that power-knowledge to effectuate that conversion, the individual implicitly had to understand himself in terms of identity-within-society, as a person-with-personhood, as one who would be held to account, and to whom this account should be significant as a matter of who he was. Individuals-as-persons were needed, and their self-surveillance was needed. To become “docile”—Foucault’s name for the ideal type of socially productive, well-adjusted citizen-body—one must be interpellated as social being, as a being whose identity within society could matter.
 
On the other side of the ledger, the anonymous bearer of power-knowledge was subjectivized into a hierarchical, bureaucratic position by way of achievements of docility (e.g., earning PhDs, moving up the corporate ladder, etc.) The fundamental attributes of power-knowledge, leaving aside all details of their nominal spheres of endeavor, are the capacity to produce knowledge, the capacity to produce docile bodies, and the capacity to produce and reproduce its own hierarchical bureaucracy. In short, at its base, power-knowledge requires a division of labor and a division of social control that depends on every member doing the assigned work in the assigned time in the prescribed fashion. Without bureaucratization, the liberal institutions Foucault interrogated could not continue to exist.
 
Where we are now is a situation in which systems of bureaucratization and hierarchy are in crisis. Obviously, this is not due to a proletariat revolution.³ It is due to the contradiction inherent in bureaucratization as a form of power. Perhaps the exemplar of bureaucratization in our computerized, networked society is the dominance of control and decision algorithms for guiding financial, industrial, and other major economic behaviors. The relationship between computer systems which wield power-knowledge and individuals upon whom power-knowledge inscribes and prescribes is at so abstract a remove from lived experience that it is barely intelligible. To most individuals, most of the time, it is invisible not only in its production of oneself as a subject, but also in its prescriptions.
 
I am not personally very interested in knowing how my credit scores are arrived at, and I am not suggesting, nor am I interested in the notion that computer systems control my life. My point is this: the fundamental arrangement of power-knowledge has gone past the models Foucault concerned himself with. The persistence, omnipresence and invisibility of power-knowledge in the shape of something like a credit score makes it appear to fit Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon. But if I am not aware of being in prison at all, if I do not or can not understand myself as a consumer, for instance, then I can not be subjectivized as such.

To conclude this all too briefly. Industrial capitalism needs workers—that is, subjects who work, subjects who are conscious of themselves as workers, who are accountable for being productive, industrious, conscientious, and “free.” The institutions of power-knowledge belonging to the era of industrial capitalism likewise need subjects who are conscious of themselves and who are accountable for having knowable identities.
 
It is not clear to me at all that consumer capitalism needs consumers who are subjects conscious of themselves as consumers. Consumers need not be accountable at all. In this era, we are not called to account as productive, industrious, conscientious, and least of all as “free,” despite (because of?) the cultural currency of these brand names.⁴ While it may appear as if advertising and marketing has taken on a decisive role as the Panopticon of Panopticons in our era, the programming of consuming does not rely on the production of subjectivity in anything like the sense Foucault analyzed. Instead of power exerted to produce an affirmative active subject, consumer capitalism produces a passive recipient/perceiver.

---

<sup>1. I have always suspected that Foucault was deeply Hegelian, especially in the archaeological period: theorization of power-knowledge always comes on the scene too late to effect change. Critics who charge that Foucault provided no basis for action are fundamentally correct. The owl of Minerva flies only at the coming of the dusk.↩
2. We ought to be struck by the way Foucault’s analyses, even of power-knowledge, assumes the relative stability of bourgeois industrial capitalism and its production and reproduction of power. Who or what else could be power if it is the nameless, identity-less, universal that Foucault suggests? Who or what else could be everywhere at once, underlying all social forms, all forms of knowledge, all institutions? Being? God?↩
3. If anything, the contrary: it is due to the crisis of industrial capitalism, and the proximity of its catastrophe. ↩
4. The hierarchical relations of our age are beginning to resemble feudalism more than industrial capitalism.↩</sup>

capitalist accumulation and education

Ernest Mandel discusses the tension in the relationship of university education to capitalist accumulation in p260ff of Late Capitalism. Late capitalism, i.e., capitalism in which technological advancement has become the main impetus for continued accumulation, depends on the production and reproduction of intellectually skilled labor. For this purpose, universities were drafted or converted from humanist institutions into knowledge and knowledge-worker factories. By 1970 when he was writing this book, it was already clear that universities would become centers for technological innovation and hence workplaces of capitalist production. That is, humanities education, moral education, and other traditional notions of the purpose of higher education, were dissolved. Only very few intellectually skilled workers need any type of humanist or artistic education—specifically, those who will produce the ideological arts (science fiction, comic books, TV, movies).

An inevitable clash occurs when a large number of people begin to demand higher education in order to enter more lucrative fields, because this drive for upward mobility conflicts with the aims and needs of capitalists. Not many intellectually skilled workers are needed, and always a dwindling number in comparison to the quantity of constant capital (dead labor in the form of extant technology): the more technological sophistication and automation the intellectually-skilled workers produce for capitalists, the fewer intellectually-skilled workers are needed for capitalists to accumulate wealth and profit.

Thus far, the rise of political conflict related to de-funding higher education makes perfect sense. Capitalists, represented by legislators, or directly acting politically in the form of tax revolts, refuse to pay for mass scale higher education, for the simple reason that it is not in their interests. The vanishing middle class continues to expect and make rather feeble demands on the state for funding of higher education. The bargain struck between them has led to the erosion over time of tax supported higher education and the shift to debt funding.

There’s another story, less economic and more political, that I think is true and helps explain the situation. Mandel’s analysis sets higher education somewhat outside the main capitalist economy (oddly, similarly to the way economists he criticizes heartily later on set the arms economy outside the main capitalist economy). Viewed another way, what has happened is that capitalists have pressed a demand for the territory of education as a new market. In fact, capitalists have demanded not only higher education, but the entire territory of education, from pre-K on up. This makes perfect sense: enormous amounts of money are spent on education, meaning that there is a pool of potential capital circulating through these institutions. While capitalist accumulation is threatened by diminishing rate of profit in the established territories of capitalist production (Marx’ famous Departments I and II), opening a new territory, gaining access to new pots of money to convert into capital, and restructuring the entire territory on the capitalist factory model could avert further crisis, until the money runs out. (This, by the way, is very similar to theories of the permanent arms economy that Mandel agrees most with—tax funding supplies a source of previously untapped capital, and the production activity itself provides a way to valorize accumulated capital. That maintaining the arms economy as a profitable venture depends on deliberately destroying both the arms and people has an analogy in education that I will leave to the reader to contemplate for now. Enjoy.)

Education is being rapidly capitalized, through direct seizure of some schools (the so-called charter schools), but mainly through imposition of curriculum, through legislation that requires use of particular pedagogies, textbooks, standardized tests, etc. that are published by major firms. Standardizing the K-12 curriculum is precisely the replacement of variable capital (labor) with constant capital (technology), which lowers the value and cost of labor by simultaneously minimizing numbers of workers needed and allowing for a reduction of wages. The effort to extend this process into higher education is already well underway.

Then there are the labor conditions to consider. Here, higher education has been in the vanguard, because of the resistance of organized labor in the K-12 sector. Real wages, and the job protections of tenure, have been largely eliminated from higher education, as the result of a bargain not at all unlike that struck infamously between auto manufacturers and UAW leadership beginning in the 1970s or so: a smaller more permanent workforce, grandfathered in, were guaranteed continuing employment, income, and pension rights, at the expense of all future employees. The work conditions, income, and real job protections of workers in the auto industry or higher education in the 1970s look like unbelievable dreams to the workers of today—such has been the destruction of labor conditions in these industries. Labor in higher education has been entirely subjected to “free market” competition, which is to say, labor on the terms dictated by capitalists. This is why tenure has to be eliminated, after all, according to every education manager: it interferes with “flexibility” that the university needs to hire according to “market demand” (which means, in reality, the absolute authority to create and control an industrial reserve army, lower wages, and exploit workers).  

culture, language, racism, and capitalist relations of production

I know I need to learn more about critical race theory, and I know the reason I have not done so is that I’m afraid to confront my own racism. (I take it for granted that there is racism embedded in my consciousness and experience.)

I posted something on Facebook about the only real issue in the Presidential campaign being the class warfare of the capitalists on all the rest of us, and one comment I received was that this isn’t true — there’s rampant racist violence, and attacks on the reproductive and health care rights of women, to name two others. My response was that the only real issue in the campaign was the economic one because the base builds the superstructure. This is a standard Marxist line, taken to explain that culture is produced and reproduced in capitalist society by capitalist social relations of production, so that every cultural phenomenon is a phenomenon of class division, commodification, alienation of labor, and the mystifications and contradictions of capitalism. I think that’s true, but not a complete story. What I want to explain here is why it's a true story.

Culture is produced and reproduced by capitalist production in capitalist society—which by now means the entire global society. Some implications of this follow.

(1) What does it mean to say that culture is produced and reproduced by capitalist social relations of production? It means that there is a class of workers whose only commodity for sale, their labor, becomes the variable capital consumed in the production of cultural artifacts. Those cultural artifacts include books, newspapers, television programs, food, language, art objects, ideas, etc. (Right now, I’m contributing surplus labor by producing the ideas that I’m writing. These words are products of capitalist relations of production because I am not the owner of the means of production, even though I nominally own the labor that I exert. Once they leave my hands, it is not clear that I am any longer the “owner” of the ideas or words, for a variety of reasons, among them that I’m using MS Word that I acquired through the university.)

Language and ideas are produced under capitalist relations of production. They are commodities with potential for becoming capital in the production of something further—more language and ideas, or a new-fangled toothbrush, or whatever. For instance, a person once wrote in an email “;-)” in order to indicate sarcasm. That has become a cultural icon, and has been capitalized upon in the production of the cultural artifacts called emojis, and emojis are now commodities that are sold to users of various social media by way of the advertising revenue generated by users. Emojis, and “;-)” are now parts of culture, parts of language, that in our ordinary dealing with the world do not appear as products of capitalist social relations of production, or as commodities. They have become “naturalized” parts of the language.

(2) In order to understand what emojis are, we have to understand not only how to apply them in social media messages (i.e., how to consume them), but how they are produced. If we follow Marx still further, that understanding is not the point, the point is to change the world, that is, to change the social relations of production that are to be found by analysis of emojis. Every analysis of culture should go in the direction of a ruthless criticism of capitalist relations of production.

(3) In as much as language and (presumably) racism existed prior to capitalism, Marxist analysis can’t explain the origin of these phenomena. That does not mean Marxist analysis is not relevant. Whatever language was prior to capitalism, it’s not the same thing now, because language is a cultural phenomenon that is produced and reproduced by current relations of production.

While it is apparently clear that those from whom we begin to acquire language are close-by cohabitors who aren’t commodifying language by speaking in the household, it does not follow that spoken language is not a consumer object. There are obvious examples of consumer object language in everyday household talk, like cultural buzzwords that derive from media consumption. But further, all language is reproduced in capitalist society by capitalist production.

Like language, so too racism. While those from whom we learn racism are also our close-by cohabitors who do not intend to commodify racism, racism is still a consumer object. There are obvious media messages that reproduce racism through stereotypes, racist images, and so on. Racism is a cultural phenomenon, and in capitalist society, all cultural phenomena are produced and reproduced through capitalist relations of production.

(4) Why does anyone produce racist images in consumer media messages? The answer to that is simple: they’re paid to do so. Now, the workers who create racist messages might or might not “believe in” the messages, but from the standpoint of capitalist production, their belief is not relevant. Only the valorization of capital advanced by the capitalist in the form of profit is relevant. From the standpoint of the capitalist, the content of the message is irrelevant as long as it is saleable and profitable. Those messages that generate more profit will be reproduced again and again as long as they are profitable. Whether this produces or reproduces a culture that suffers violence, hatred, fear, and dysfunction is also not relevant to the capitalist, except in so far as those sufferings can be treated as needs for which consumer objects can be produced for a profit.

It is important to emphasize that this does not explain the origin of racism (or of language). But I’m not sure discovering the origin of racism is important for dealing with racism. I am sure that dealing with racism will require dealing with profiteering from it.

a brief interpretation of higher education, inspired by Georg Lukács

As long as higher education is construed through ideology, it will be impossible to develop the basis for overturning the social relations within. The ideology prevents us from confronting the contradictions of education in capitalist society.

1. Education provides access to socially produced goods—job security and income being the most commonly cited. The ideology tells us that this access is on the basis of merit earned by students’ academic and social-benefit work through the auspices of the institution. In fact, education is an institutional state apparatus that determines access to goods through sorting candidates, then subjecting those admitted to disciplines that produce a consciousness perfectly suited to the tasks of upholding and reproducing status quo predominant social relations. Power, wealth, and prestige are reproduced in a docile subject.

2. Education develops democratic citizenship. The ideology addresses democratic virtues of critical thinking, autonomy, and social responsibility. It develops these as the skills of individuals, in service to the prevailing social order. The possibilities of collective action are marginalized both by institutional policy and architecture, but also by the standards and protocols of evaluation. The democratic citizen produced by education is a individualist-bourgeois consciousness, prepared for fulfilling a role established by nationalist, capitalist aims. Meanwhile, this consciousness believes in individualist concepts of rights, merit, property, etc.—i.e., it does not believe in collectivism, cosmopolitanism, or the free ability to form social bonds through the collective will.

3. Education creates whole human beings through transformative experience. The ideology refers to the individual as a being whose transformation is needed and valuable. The self-regard of this form of consciousness further naturalizes individualism by producing a reality effect in which the individual is held up in opposition to the social whole. The cult of the fetishized individual makes it unintelligible that this effect is the result of being caught up in the social whole that is constructed through education (among other institutional state apparatuses). In fact, even the individualism worshipped in education is a false and mistaken one—individualism as the development of a “personality” composed of “lifestyle choices” which are nothing more than selections of consumer objects.

4. Education creates public good. The least tangible and plausible claim of the education ideology is that it benefits the social whole. Because education reproduces and recapitulates the class divisions in capitalist society, and naturalizes these along with the notions of merit, productivity, individual responsibility, etc., the product of education can only serve the class interests of capitalist society. The “public good” so named is an orderly (i.e. compliant) society where class divisions themselves can be occluded.

Yet these self-destructive, exploitative principles are marshaled in defense of education by “progressive” educators and their collaborators. Tax support of so-called public higher education is advocated on the grounds that education is the key to economic and social progress—for individuals, entry into the “middle class;” for society, creation of an army of professionals to provide ameliorations for various ills.

Here yet another contradiction is hidden: the ills for which the “middle class” needs amelioration are created by “middle class” consumption. Indeed, the ills of the society as a whole, and of the planet, are created by religious devotion to consumption. That consumption further drives worldwide exploitation of people and planet that enriches capitalists while it impoverishes everyone else. While those in the “middle class” perceive themselves to be beneficiaries of consumer society because they live among technological means, it is nearly impossible to discover, and really impossible to perceive the real effects and costs of consumption.

Education provides the ways and means of consumption: consumers and consumer objects. And of course, the amelioration of the ills of consumption is brought about by more consumption. For alienation from other people, consume “communications media” devices! For physiological and psychological malaise, consume medicine!

Meanwhile, real power and wealth not only remain in the hands of capitalists, but they accumulate still more. Their own false consciousness prevents understanding that their own power and wealth is dependent upon a fatal addiction to consumption and is destined to end. A despoiled, smoldering planet uninhabitable by humans is also uninhabitable by capitalists.

To the extent that any of this is true, education as it is currently formulated can not benefit anyone. The only form of education that could, would be a thoroughly critical education, aiming not to contribute to the prevailing social order but to bring about its destruction. This critical education could not promise any individual a better life, because the destruction needed will be costly and painful, and the conclusion of the revolutionary period is in an unknowably distant future. Critical education could not promise any kind of advance in the power or wealth of individuals—on the contrary, it would lead them to be ill-suited to the labor routines and compliance demanded by every workplace. Critical education could promise pain and suffering. It could promise exposure to forms of thinking that are unrecognizable in bourgeois culture. It could promise exposure to severe disciplinary tactics and state violence.

faculty moral responsibility for education fraud

Between 1999 and 2011, student loan debt increased 511%. College graduate unemployment is a little under 9%. The largest single employment sector in the US economy is retail sales. The largest sector of employment growth in the last two years is in temporary, low-skilled work.

The knowledge-based and expertise-based legitimations of college education are long dead. College degrees as credentials for entry into information-processing jobs are nearly dead. There is some reason to think college education provides relevant training that can be useful in various careers -- largely indirectly, through the development of "hidden curriculum" skills and attributes like perseverance, rule-following, mastering encrypted forms of communication like academic prose, etc. But these careers have lost a lot of their prestige and power, and are losing stability and security rapidly.

Under these conditions, getting a college education has to appear much less like a shrewd investment, and more like an expensive gamble. The basic economic function of colleges and universities -- non-profit and "public" as well as private and for-profit -- is to transfer wealth from poor laboring classes to rich capitalists who leech from the system at every pore. (Contemporary capitalism is called by several colorful names: disaster capitalism, predatory capitalism, casino capitalism. I think I like parasite capitalism.)

At some point, I imagine, the economic behavior of people will change to reflect this, and people will stop going to college. I fantasize how people might hold higher education to account for this economic arrangement, and for what could be called fraud.

What is my moral responsibility for this, as a college faculty member, given that I benefit (though modestly, especially compared to parasite capitalists)? Should I discourage people from going to college, despite the potential ramifications to my gainful employment? Should I try to show this perspective to current students, despite the potential ramifications to the teacher-student relationship? Can I "teach" a class, without excessive irony, after I have exposed this arrangement?

Let's see.

poverty

A line in Foucault's lecture course Abnormal led me to consider the contemporary conditions of poverty. His line was about the outmoded concept of power as repressive and always wielded in the same direction, from the same source. He called that model of power "feudal." The model of power since the late 18th century, he says, is productive, and makes arrangements for production and circulation, not repression and deduction. This model of power cannot be confined to certain institutions, nor to a certain narrow range of relations.

I started to wonder if Foucault's view of power is starting to lose its explanatory power. The increasing wealth gap in the affluent parts of the world, the de-legitimation of social and political institutions, and the increase in poverty, suggested to me that the feudal model of power might be heading for a comeback.

On one level, it makes some sense to consider the emerging form of power to be feudal. The trope of the 1% versus the 99% expresses something like this: the 1% wield power over their societies, over the world, and over all resources. Democratic elections are basically meaningless exercises, because the power of concentrated wealth simply undermines any authority any elected representative might be willing to use to the benefit of citizens. Look at Greece and Spain. Look at the US.

Yeah, I thought, the superwealthy are reducing the rest of us to serfdom.

But there's a significant difference between feudalism and contemporary poverty. Serfs more or less belonged to the feudal lord, were basically required to do his bidding, and owned nothing. Serfs worked the land, the feudal lord accumulated wealth, and granted some portion of the product of their labor to the serfs -- sufficient to keep them working.

Contemporary poverty doesn't have that benefit. The very poor do not work. In a way, they are required not to work, for the profit of the superwealthy. Underemployment, part-time work, permatemped work is degraded. The work is degraded. This generates profit because the fantastic accumulation of wealth takes place these days by way of controlling how much gets produced, when, and where, and assuring that production only takes place under those circumstances. In contemporary poverty, you do not get to work the land.

Of course, there are many of our contemporary poor who do work the land, I'm aware of that. (Duh, I live in California.) Unlike serfs, they do not belong to the land they work, nor to the landowner. They do not belong anywhere except where their (note: temporary, and also illegal) work is required at a given moment. Otherwise, they are not allowed to be on the land.

Where do they very poor belong? I'm tempted to say nowhere. For the comfort and convenience of the wealthy, it is necessary that the very poor be dispatched, sent away, remain hidden. If you walk or ride your bike through enough of Turlock's streets, and pay attention to what you see, you'll find lots full of campers, in which people live. There is one in a parking lot behind a small hotel down our block. There might be 20 or 30 campers in there -- I'm talking about the kind of camper one might tow, not a 30-foot RV. The people living there are not serfs, because they have no land to work, even if they would have been granted permission to grow anything.

And this is to say nothing at all of those who do not even have a camper to their names, and who have no place at all that they have a right to be.

blog post topix - where to start?

This morning the LA Times site offered me this: "State's swelling deficit will bring painful cuts. Where to start?"

This is a story I've had keen interest in, for obvious reasons. I thought, good, analysis, maybe an op-ed. Instead, the post repeats the basics of Jerry Brown's preview of the May revised budget doom, then asks readers to offer their no doubt marvelous ideas for cutting the state budget.

This is the genius of contemporary capitalism in capsule form: paying subscribers are now providing the content they read from the LA Times site. (It's also another brilliant tool for undermining information exchange and giving social approval to the uninformed opinion of what Schütz called "the man in the street.") Eventually, the LA Times won't need to hire reporters, editorial writers, editors, or anybody else but technical support staff!

Interesting concept. So, readers, let me know what topics should be covered in this space in future posts! Increase the chances your post idea will be selected by writing it yourself!

solid, air, etc.

My National Novel Writing Month project began with a simple premise. What if major corporations decided that planned obsolescence wasn't aggressive enough a strategy for provoking consumer purchases of new goods. What if, instead, they had teams of people who broke into our houses, broke our stuff, and made it look like normal wear and tear?

I wrote a brief scene of this last summer sometime, and then it turned into this novel.

And then the novel turned from being a goofy little satire on consumerism, into a black comedy about corporate capitalism. It's become a Kafkaesque satire, which is to say, it's funny in the way that things are funny when your choices are laughing or doom. It's the kind of funny people will appreciate who also appreciate the humor of these lines from the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

I know! And that's Karl Marx, not Groucho!

basic contradiction

On my walk home, contemplating Manuel Castells' brilliant analysis of al-Qaeda in The Power of Identity, I started thinking about basic contradictions in cultures, and the way they instigate crises. Al-Qaeda's main ideological origin is the contradictions in Middle East political and cultural life - the accumulation of wealth and power by those who own the means to access petroleum reserves, versus the essential piety and humility of Islam.

We have a very similar contradiction in the US, and it's odd that hardly anyone seems to notice. The majority of Americans regard themselves as Christian, and yet do not see that our society's official reverence for market capitalism is totally at odds with the values of the teachings of Jesus. It's pretty plain, though, it seems to me: "love your neighbor" is really contrary to "screw your neighbor," the official competitive motto of capitalist economies. Jesus taught that the poor are blessed and shall inherit the earth; the capitalist faith claims the poor deserve to be poor because they're lazy or talentless.

And yes, I know there are evangelical contortionists who twist the beatitudes into knots in order to rationalize the view that the poor have earned their poverty as punishment for their sins. I just don't see how that could be truly compelling in the face of the Gospels. (Then again, I'm neither a student of the Bible nor a Christian, so this is all external critique, natch.)

I mean, you could at least prettify the situation by saying that capitalism is a kind of unfortunate state of nature - original sin as economic reality. That would at least save some of the fundamental tenets of Medieval Christianity. Then Christian faith could take the role of how one cleanses oneself from the wages of sin (pun intended).

Another interpretation would be that either the faith in capital or the faith in Christ are hypocritical or cynical. In that case, the faithful would use their expressions of faith to assuage their consciences (assuming), their god (assuming), or their bankers (well, those, at least, do exist). I'm less inclined to this view, mainly because it's less kinky, and I do like kink in my theology.

Anyway, one might wonder whether, or when, this basic contradiction in American social and cultural life might express itself in violence. If so, one would obviously have missed the past 20 years or so of domestic terrorism, the rise of the militia/patriot/tea party movement, and, not to put to fine a point on it, the Bushes.

You know that old saying, "There are no atheists in foxholes"? I always want to know if there are any Christians in potholes.