Monk

The Times put out an interesting column by Gar Alperovitz, who seems to have some of the air of the lefty radical about him. In light of the continuing scandals of the banking and finance industry, he argues that maybe we should consider nationalizing the industry on the grounds that it is no longer competitive and the banks are obviously too big to be effectively regulated.

You could expect this from the Times and a lefty, but what made this piece interesting is that he grounds his argument on the basis of conservative philosophy and the Chicago School, the pinnacle of conservative economics. The key is the important place that competition played in capitalist theory.

The central problem, then as now, was that very large corporations could easily undermine regulatory and antitrust strategies. The Nobel laureate George J. Stigler demonstrated how regulation was commonly “designed and operated primarily for” the benefit of the industries involved. And numerous conservatives, including Simons, concluded that large corporate players could thwart antitrust “break-them-up” efforts — a view Friedman came to share.

Simons did not shrink from the obvious conclusion: “Every industry should be either effectively competitive or socialized.” If other remedies were unworkable, “The state should face the necessity of actually taking over, owning, and managing directly” all “industries in which it is impossible to maintain effectively competitive conditions.”

Unfortunately, though, it would seem that these financial players are also too big and powerful to be nationalized as well. If you cannot meangingully regulate them, how can you take them over? Mr. Alperovitz raises a very interesting debating point, but nothing practical can come of it. Nevertheless, I thought it was a point worth keeping.

For the record, as much as I would love to see these masters of the universe have their noses rubbed in it, I am not very big on the idea of nationalization. It seems like too much power for government and would have to prove corrupting over time. Though, I can smile at the idea of temporarily nationalizing them and then selling them out in smaller pieces again. This is still dreaming, of course, but it might be nice if more people at least considered it. It seems fair to say that the system, as it stands, is only going to crash us. It has already injured us with a broken economy and an engorging inequality that distorts and wrecks our democratic politics.

It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.

The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.

The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.

-- George Monbiot at The Guardian

I didn't even know there was an Earth Summit. My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. But, yeah, I don't think 'less' is a viable political solution. Everyone wants more goods, more bread and circuses, from the poor to the rich, even me, even Mr. Monbiot, I'm sure. I imagine this is one of the reasons why people are fascinated by apocalyptic visions and the end of the world, or at least the end of civilization, Western and Eastern. We know that what we are doing is unsustainable, and many of us even suspect that we are probably coming close to crashing against the wall of the limits of the environment and the economy. Regardless, we just want to enjoy life as much as we can before the lights go out.

The wondrous things one will come across on the Internet! I had not heard of George Scialabba before, but I came across this interesting interview. Mr. Scialabba is a book critic and apparently a bit of a radical - of the intellectual sort rather than the bomb-throwing type. I thought we'd catch a snippet or two. He is being interviewed by Puya Gerami, and the subject is on the historical move from the generalist to the specialist in public intellectualism, and how it's really just not quite as fun as it used to be. I guess there has to be some loss in going from the literary to social science.


_ _ _

GS: As the US evolved from a yeoman republic in the mid-nineteenth century to a mass society, as industrial production in particular became the dominant form of economic relations, the new society needed a workforce that was trained up in new skills. So mass education was inaugurated. Now, one of the dangers of mass education, or education of any kind, is that it empowers the educated. It suggests potentially subversive questions about their relation to authority. From the point of view of the owners of society, inquiry of that sort had to be cut off at the knees, or at least, had to be carefully managed. And so new ideologies and techniques of social control, popular management, and the manufacture of consent were developed in the form of the advertising industry, the science of marketing, and public relations as a new aspect of politics and public management.

[Monk: I would take issue with the note of dark conspiracy, and argue that greater knowledge and more mature scientific methods naturally took the most serious and relevant discussions of politics and policy beyond the common and general mind. Hey, math is hard, as is detailed historical analysis.]

One of the tools of the manufacture of consent was expertise. Public relations involved finding engineers, scientists, and social scientists who could make the ruling class's case persuasively. Formerly, all you needed to criticize American foreign policy and corporate policy effectively was a good ear for bullshit. Because government and business propagandists were basically amateurs, their critics could be amateurs. But the new techniques of social control called into being a whole new cohort of intellectuals - one might call them anti-public intellectuals: intellectuals in the service of power rather than in the service of the public. They deployed expertise, which in turn required that they be countered with expertise. But expertise takes time and effort to acquire; and it proved difficult to combine this time and effort with what had formerly been the chief activity of public intellectuals, that is, the cultivation of the humanities. Literary intellectuals like Randolph Bourne or Mark Twain, or philosophers like William James, could muster perfectly adequate critiques of American foreign policy in the early industrial age. But when the ruling class got smarter and better at hiring its apologists, the public needed experts of its own. And these tended to be investigative journalists--I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald--or maverick scholars, like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, John Kenneth Galbraith, Christopher Lasch, or William Appleman Williams.

[...]

PG: You write that these new public intellectuals, in effect, sacrificed literary timelessness for the exigencies of real politics.

GS: Well, yes, putting it like that was a little bit of a literary flourish on my part. But it's true in this sense: people will read Orwell and Camus forever because their political rhetoric is itself a kind of art, a form of literature. People won't read Chomsky or even I.F. Stone forever. I hope they'll read them for a good long time, for as long as this is a class society. But even after this is no longer a class society, people will read Orwell for the beauties of his prose and the windings of his sensibility; while they'll be able to put aside I.F. Stone, gratefully, and say: "All right, God bless him for his beautiful life, but now we've learned what he had to teach; may he rest in peace."

-- George Scialabba

So: why was Marx right?

Someone asked me that last night at a talk, and I mentioned Greece. There’s irony in the fact that in the midst of the most affluent civilization history has witnessed people are scavenging in rubbish baskets for food. That’s the kind of contradiction I think Marx was talking about. I also stressed how much Marx admired the way that capitalism had in a very short space of time accumulated such wealth—material, spiritual, cultural—but that it couldn’t do that without the contradiction of generating inequality at the same time; we’re seeing a stark instance of that in Greece today. So that’s the kind of thing I’d point to to show the relevance of Marx. Even within the anti-capitalist movement, Marx is not a majority presence. One has to say that. It’s partly because of the discrediting of Marxism by Stalinism, which will take a long time for the Marxist left to recover from. But I’m not myself madly concerned about whether people stick the label “Marxist” onto themselves as long as they take a critical stance towards the present situation. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves.

-- Terry Eagleton

Our old friend Mr. Eagleton. It's not surprising that there is a little revival going on for leftist thought. Who knows, if things keep going as they are for another couple of years, it might get a lot noisier.

Kark Marx invented the word 'capitalism'?

The word “capitalism,” invented by Karl Marx as a term of ignominy, has become a term of celebration; in much the same way that gangsta rappers have made the traditional term of abuse directed at black people their own property, economic liberals have laid claim to Marx’s term of disparagement. Just as Ice Cube famously proclaimed himself “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate,” Steve Forbes christened his private jet “Capitalist Tool.” We have all learned to speak Marxism, even when we are condemning it.

Now why didn't I come across this delicious tidbit before?

“It is unfortunate that there is no political party in the United States to run against Goldman Sachs. I am in favor of elections, but there is no way I can vote against Goldman Sachs.”

-- Chandler Davis

Funny that we don't hear more of this sentiment from the so-called populist uprising of our Tea Partiers. Of course, that is part of Mr. Davis's larger theme, the silencing of lefty ideas. He, himself, did time in prison for not cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and had been associated with communism. He argues that the repression of the McCarthy era shut down that side of the debate in American politics, hence skewing the way we think and talk about politics and about what is possible. Although ideas that far on the left do seem to have always been well outside the American mainstream, I can buy into the idea that our fearless leaders may have been overly reactive.