duck dynasty

Since it's all everyone seems to be talking about, my thoughts on the Duck Dynasty thing:

1. The First Amendment protects you from the government, not from the social consequences of what you say. From a purely legal standpoint, if you do something that can potentially hurt your employer financially, they generally have the right to suspend or fire you (especially if it's in your contract), and other people have the right to think you're a shithead. The Duckdude hasn't been arrested for it (like Eugene Debs was for speaking out against war during WWI), so his First Amendment rights haven't been violated.

I don't personally think people should be fired simply because they hold certain beliefs, even if they're stupid ones; but if a paid employee publicly says something that may damage their employer's brand or those of their sponsors, said employer has legal grounds for discipline or dismissal (my company has a similar policy as much as I disagree with it), and the public has a right to think you're a shithead. Neither is a violation of the First Amendment.

2. I think things like bigotry, racism, sexism, etc. should be confronted wherever they're found. For one, these ideas and attitudes have very real consequences for a lot of people who happen to be gay, female, transgendered, non-white, etc., and who often have to face harassment, discrimination, and worse simply because of who they are. People shouldn't get a pass for being bigoted, racist, sexist, etc. simply because of their age, where they grew up, or anything else for that matter. (Don't get upset, he's old/Baptist/southern/whatever after all. Hatin' on queers is just their thing.)

That said, I think these kinds of situations require more than just indignation and outrage; they require us to confront these realities and have a discussion about them in order to help shine a light onto their continued existence and help motivate us to actively challenge them wherever we find them hiding, especially within ourselves. We're all conditioned on some level by our surrounding and upbringing. We all have prejudices of some sort. The Duckdude shouldn't be persecuted for what he said, but used as another catalyst for further challenging and changing negative societal attitudes towards the LGBT community.

What is progress, really, if not our ability to transcend our conditionings and prejudices?

in defense of 'entitlements'

I think this article makes a good point re: the left embracing the term 'entitlement' in the sense that, "The discourse of entitlement is a discourse of rights, of human agents claiming what’s theirs instead of asking permission from the powerful":

In Defense of ‘Entitlements’

Certainly, from a socialist perspective, entitlement programs shouldn't be some sort of end goal, but like labour laws, rent control, single-payer healthcare, UBIs, etc., they're a useful tool in helping support the working class in the here and now (under the current mode of production) while at the same time chipping away at the idea that only people doing x for y amount of time and/or for z amount of money are worthy of eating, having shelter, having access to healthcare, enjoying free time, etc. Our society is indeed a twisted one if we truly hold that only those rare few with sufficient material means thereby earn access to "the rudiments of life" (i.e., food, healthcare, shelter, etc.) while the rest of humanity is SOL.

The neoliberal narrative is that you should distrust poor people, but we should not only question that narrative, we should question the very basis for it.

pythagoreanism 2.0?

An intriguing article about an intriguing discovery:

Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics

The description of the newly discovered geometric object, the amplituhedron, its ability to simplify complex mathematical formulas, and its existence's suggestive consequences re: a possible new geometric approach to both particle interactions and the structure and evolution of the universe itself brings to mind some old Pythagorean ideas about math, nature, and harmony.

In particular, the description of a "'master amplituhedron' with an infinite number of facets" whose volume theoretically "represents the total amplitude of all physical processes" and its relationship to 'lower-dimensional amplituhedra' that "live on the faces of this master structure" and which "correspond to interactions between finite numbers of particles" is reminiscent of Pythagorean ideas re: the 'infinite' (apeiron) and its relationship to the 'limited' (peiron).

The former suggests that the laws of the universe are the way that they are because of the way the master geometry of the universe is shaped, while the latter suggests a harmonic and mathematical order to the way the limited takes shape or unfolds from the unlimited, emphasizing the role of numbers in understanding the universe, which in my opinion makes quantum physics sound almost like a type of neo-Pythagoreanism.

All they need to do at this point is to incorporate vegetarianism and a theory of rebirth into the mix and we'll have Pythagoreanism 2.0.

zarathustra, the unintentional capitalist

While Nietzsche's distaste for capitalism is relatively well-known, it struck me how easily the chapter "War and Warriors" in Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is essentially about the way once should approach the predominately internal process of struggle and self-overcoming needed in the quest to becoming a Superman (and possibly a stab at German militarism just for good measure), can be interpreted as expounding and extolling the underlying philosophy of the rational, self-interested capitalist (especially if one replaces the terms 'man' with 'labourer' and 'Superman' with 'capitalist'). To me, the imagery shouts 'competition!', 'accumulation for accumulation's sake!', and 'don't bemoan the success of fellow capitalists more profitable than you, their class interests are still your class interests!' as much as it does 'struggle for knowledge!', 'overcome yourself for overcoming's sake!', and 'be proud of your enemy and their success because their success is also yours!' I don't know. I'm sure that wasn't his intention, but that's my perception of it, at any rate.

revolutionary paramnesia

I was watching a video called "Myths of the Founding Fathers" the other day and it struck me as kind of ironic how many people, whether liberal, conservative, or otherwise, scoff at the mention of Marx or socialism while at the same time having nothing but praise and reverence for the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. Don't they realize that the Founding Fathers are themselves guilty of that dreaded Marxist 'e' word, expropriation?

For example, in chapter 32 of Capital, Marx, writing about the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation, describes the logic process whereby the "the expropriators are expropriated" due to the "monopoly of capital" becoming a "fetter upon the mode of production" and leading to a point where the "centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour" becomes incompatible with their capitalist integument, sounding "the knell of capitalist private property." At the very mention of the expropriators being expropriated, however, such people tend to vociferously object and sing the praises of our fair republic, invoking the sanctity of private property rights and condemning expropriation as theft.

But if you think about it, the Founding Fathers and their selective respect for property rights did just that—they expropriated the private property of Britain despite the enormous amount of capital put into establishing, supporting, and managing colonial settlements by Britain and companies like the London and Bristol Company, Hudson's Bay Company, etc. The only real difference between the two is that the American Revolution was a relatively conservative, bourgeois revolution of wealthy, ruling-class elites that itself feared a revolution of the propertyless, labouring class, whereas what Marx was talking about is a revolution of labour over capital.

While many colonists remained loyal to Britain or else remained neutral during the conflict, it can't be denied that a large portion also supported declaring independence from Britain because they felt they had more interests in common with the American revolutionaries and the Enlightenment ideals that fueled, or at the very least justified, their fight for independence. "Sure, your property interests are our interests, plus we love liberty and hate taxation without representation too!" But this isn't all that surprising considering that the ruling class, owning to their control over the means of material and mental production, utilize these in such a way as to promote their own ideas and interests, or as Marx puts it in The German Ideology, "the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

So our country was founded up various forms of expropriation, from the expropriation of Native American land to that of the private property of Britain. And in the process, we merely exchanged one capitalist ruling class for another. One could argue, then, that the revolution itself is in a sense incomplete, which reminds me of an interesting article I read a while back connecting the political emancipation realized via the American Revolution, and the 'neo-Roman' republicanism associated with the Enlightenment ideals of the Founding Fathers underlying it, to the logically consistent extension of those emancipatory ideals and actions into the economic sphere, suggesting that true independence won't be won until we're liberated from the structural and personal forms of dependence that characterize wage-labour under capitalism.

At the very least, I think this look at how segments of the American working class extended these emancipatory ideals and actions into the economic sphere offers present-day socialists, etc. in the US an interesting rhetorical basis from which to argue that both the philosophical and political foundation of US republicanism, championed by conservatives and liberals, are actually more potentially revolutionary than they're willing to admit, limiting the concept of freedom to one small area of civil society. That "To demand that 'there is to be a people in industry, as in government' [is] simply to argue that the cooperative commonwealth [is] nothing more than the culmination and completion of the American Revolution's republican aspirations."

In other words, the revolution isn't won yet!

the 'noble lie' of the aca

From Jacobin Magazine, a look at the financial feasibility of enacting a single-payer healthcare system vs. the Affordable Care Act, which in my opinion further undermines the myth that the ACA was the best 'they' could do for 'us' under the circumstances:

 The Backroom Deal That Could've Given Us Single-Payer

Personally, I think part of the difficulty to getting something like a single-payer healthcare system enacted is the structure of our political-economic system itself, which was designed from its very inception to represent and protect the interests of wealthy, ruling elites while appealing to the notions of freedom and equality. Historically, things that look out for and protect the production and accumulation of wealth for those at the top of the economic food chain are systematically much easier to institute than things which tend to benefit the mass of working-class people, which often require a great deal of prolonged struggle and threat of rebellion.

Because the Affordable Care Act keeps the current structure basically intact while forcing more people into the insurance market, protecting the jobs and income of health insurance company execs, pharmaceutical company execs, industry lobbyists, etc., it appears as the best possible solution under the circumstances from the point of view of capital and the state, incurring less opposition by Congress and a myriad of interest groups "willing and able to spend millions lobbying, hiring former politicians, and donating to campaigns." The stated purpose of the ACA (and health insurance in general) is to help make healthcare more affordable, but what it really does is help further spread risk for insurers while they continue to accumulate a share of the aggregate surplus-value of society in their role as unnecessary middlemen.

The ACA doesn't rock the boat too much while attempting (or at least appearing) to deliver better/more affordable coverage to working-class Americans. To criticize the ACA from this point of view, then, is to criticize the very system that designed and enacted it, a system that's much less democratic and egalitarian than is popularly believed. The ACA isn't malicious, but it's not necessarily in our best interest, either; just as our current political-economic system isn't malicious, but not necessarily in our best interest.

What would more in our interest, for example, is a single-payer healthcare system, but they didn't even consider a single-payer model when crafting their healthcare reform. They worked this deal out with the insurance companies in closed-door negotiations. And it's a terrible deal, in my opinion. Yes, it helps some people get better coverage and prevents others from being dropped or not being accepted due to previous health issues, but it also jacks up the prices for others and puts people like me, one of the growing number of 'working poor,' into a bad financial situation. On top of that, the healthcare exchange system itself if relatively complicated and time-consuming to navigate.

I recently enrolled in a bronze plan through my employer, with its lower premiums but higher deductibles and out of pockets expenses, because it was the only thing I could afford (and by 'afford,' I mean it's the least costly option out of several I can't actually afford). And as I was looking at the selection of plans — bronze, silver, gold, platinum — I was reminded of 'the myth of the metals' in book III of Plato's Republic, where Socrates and Glaucon's hypothetical society is stratified into three social classes via a kind of "Phoenician tale" in order to make the citizens more inclined to accept their respective social positions and the rule of the state (i.e., a way to counter the factionalism or class struggle Founding Fathers like James Madison were so worried about).

The myth or noble lie, which some interpret to be Plato's programme for his ideal utopia, is that each citizen's soul is imbued with a certain kind of metal—gold for those fit to rule, silver for helpers/soldiers, and bronze for the class of productive labourers. As the tale goes, the city-state will prosper if these metals remain unmixed and in their proper place; but if the city-state is ruled by those whose souls are mixed with the wrong metal, the city will fall into ruin.

I wonder if maybe the ACA is just one of the many, tedious 'noble lies' told to us 'bronze' citizens to keep us pacified in Obama's modern, neoliberal utopia in which we're "forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives."

higher taxes on the wealthy may help in the short term, but it's not a magic-bullet solution to the current slump

From Business Insider:

Sorry, Folks, Rich People Actually Don't 'Create The Jobs'

Superficially, I think this article makes a good point insofar as it acknowledges the role the working class plays as consumers, and as a consequence, job creators. In all the talk about spurring job creation and economic growth, particularly in relation to nurturing the present economic recovery, it's often argued that the wealthy (i.e., capital) are the real 'creators'; and those who do often propose that lowering taxes and lessening regulations for businesses and the wealthy will help make it easier for them to create more jobs despite the fact that the data doesn't seem to support this as an effective strategy.

As such, I think it's at least worth pointing out that the consumer side of the economic feedback loop is just as important as the business side of the equation; and as the article argues, any remotely successful plan to spur job growth can't afford to ignore working-class consumers in favour of businesses since demand is ultimately determined by the consumptive power of the working class itself. From this perspective, it's easy to argue that either a lack of supply or a lack of demand (underconsumption) is the cause of our current economic woes, which in turn prompt measures to either stimulate supply or consumption. The former through things like tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy that 'trickle down' into more supply and jobs, stimulating consumption, and the latter through things like tax breaks or higher wages for workers that help stimulate consumption, thereby increasing demand and jobs.

But that's only part of the story. What's missing from this analysis are deeper problems that are embedded within the economy itself, which not only induces economic crises and downturns, but also prevents solutions like simply lowering taxes or raising wages from working—the problems of overaccumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The basis of our economic system is relatively simple. On the one end, money is invested as capital (to purchase equipment, raw materials, labour, etc.) to produce commodities that are then sold for a profit. On the other, the majority of those commodities are purchased by the people employed to produce them, the working class. Jobs, then, are created in the flux of this symbiotic relationship between supply and demand. If investors don't have the money to invest as capital, then supply is reduced, the economy slows, and jobs can't be created. If consumers can't afford to purchase goods, then consumption is reduced, the economy slows, and jobs can't be created. Ideally, supply and demand should be in equilibrium.

Within this process of transforming money into commodities and then back into money plus a surplus (profit), however, there are a number of contradictions that give rise to imbalances and crises of overaccumulation. And when due to these, both the mass of superfluous (i.e., unproductive) capital and labour increase in conjunction with technological advances and efficiencies in production, they cause the rate of profit to fall and a shrinkage in the absolute mass of profit produced. Moreover, if the rate of profit in that process falls to a certain level, preventing money from being able to be transformed into money plus a surplus, then both supply and demand are reduced, and as a consequence, employment, which feeds back into the downturn.

In essence, when accumulation is too high and the market is flooded with devalued capital that prevents its reinvestment from producing sufficient returns and/or goods that can't be sold, the economy stalls. If profit can't be realized, then capital can't function as capital and it sits unutilized. To get things started back up, both employers and the state look for find ways to overcome this problem, whether through encouraging debt spending by consumers, the opening of new markets for export, the 'creative destruction' of superfluous capital (mostly through state consumption), or creating ways to increase the mass of profit via evolutions (i.e., innovations) in the means of production and finance that, in turn, set up the conditions for further overaccumulation and crises.

The post-WWII boom is a case in point. People (especially on the left) often like to point towards this snapshot in history as an ideal time, an economic golden age, noting the fact that taxes on the wealthy were high and so was employment, wages, and economic growth. What those same people may not realize, however, is that the massive destruction of superfluous capital (as well as the industrial centres of Europe and Asia) caused by the war paved the way for the US's growing prosperity following the Great Depression, which was arguably caused by a crisis of overaccumulation and the subsequent over-indebtedness and financial speculation utilized to bolster consumption and profits. In other words, it wasn't simply an issue of taxes and wages being just right, but Washington's consumption of unproductive capital and labour through the war economy and the increase in exports that resulted from the actual destruction of Europe and Asia's means of productions.

The inconvenient truth of capitalism is that crises arise naturally and are needed to help destroy unproductive capital, whether through businesses failing, the depreciation of existing value/wealth, wars, or whatever, clearing the way for the creation of future value/wealth. This, in turn, creates a decrease in the labour force (i.e., unemployment of productive labour) that helps drive down wages, allowing capital to temporarily increase nominal profits even if the tendency of the rate of profit falls in the long term. And since it appears on the surface that either a lack of supply or a lack of demand is the problem, the role that crises play in acting as what Marx calls a 'counteracting factor' is obscured.

The way I see it, this obscuration is one of the things that make capitalism appear like a perpetual growth/profit-making machine, as well as more stable than it truly is. This is somewhat similar to Chris Harman's take on the TRPF, i.e., that crises are the prime counteracting factors mentioned by Marx, with recoveries being limited in effectiveness over time due to a combination of things like units of capital become larger and more interlinked (the bigger they are, the harder they fall) and increases in the level of unproductive labour in both the private and public sector (the former due to capital attempting to defend and expand markets in unproductive ways, waves of speculative investments, top-heavy corporate hierarchies, etc.; the latter due to government spending via the military, stimulus measures, etc.).

The true limit to crises as a counteracting factor, however, may be labour itself, specifically labour time, which capital tries to increase in order to extract more profit from the labourer in order to compensate for a falling rate of profit and the fact that much of this labour is itself superfluous, i.e., labor time that "consists in the production of values that do not reenter the capitalist reproduction process" (Re: The People). But a person can only work so much, and if the labour itself is 'unproductive,' increasing it only serves to lower the rate of profit in the long term. This, as a consequence, creates the conditions for future (and potentially more severe) crises. One possible solution on the road to a post-capitalist society, then, may actually be an overall reduction in hours of labour.

The real question is how this society of minimal hours of labour and maximum hours of leisure can be achieved, which, under the logic of capitalism, it can't, since this is the point where surplus value is created and realized by capital, i.e., a reduction in labour hours under capitalism will ultimately serve to reduce the mass of surplus value (and with it profit), which, according to the labour theory of value, is itself intimately tied into the amount of labour time required for the production of commodities. Simply socializing aspects of capitalist production, such as finance, while ignoring the process of production itself won't get rid of the "coercive pressure of competition and accumulation" inherent within capitalism, and hence can't full transcend it or its limitations.

We're currently experiencing the effects of yet another economic slump, which in my opinion is almost certainly caused by a crisis of overaccumulation and the subsequent over-indebtedness and financial speculation utilized to bolster consumption and profits. And while from a progressive standpoint higher taxes on businesses and the wealthy may help to consume some of this unproductive capital, which in turn can be used to subsidized social safety nets for struggling workers, it's not enough to fix the problem. Employment may rise, and the economy may continue to grow; but the cycle of crises and the pain they cause will continue either way.

some rambling thoughts on choice, value, and the subjugation of labour under capitalism

It's often argued that capitalism values choice and equality, and that demand yields value, not labour. But that may not be the whole story, and things may not be as equitable as they appear.

According to the labour theory of value, for example, value in the context of capitalism is primarily determined by the socially necessary labour time required for a commodity's production, which is then sold by the average or market value. So a commodity's value, which is qualitatively expressed by its use-value, is quantitatively expressed via its exchange-value, its price being a measure of its value against a particular money-form. Demand for a commodity, its degree of usefulness in fulfilling a want or need, is only one aspect of its value.

From this perspective, what a person receives in payment isn't the full value of their labour power due to an inherent inequality in capitalist social relations between capital and labour. This seed of inequality, however, is easily obscured, as are capitalist social relations and the origin of profit, which from the Marxist perspective arises out of the division of the workday into necessary labour and surplus labour. But since all labour appears as paid labour, it's easy to argue that capital's role in the production process and demand's role in the process of exchange is the source of value (essentially separating capital as an independent and autonomous factor of production) despite the actual complexity of capitalist production and distribution, completely obscuring labour's contribution in the creation and realization of profit.

But as David Harvey illustrates in Limits to Capital, part of Marx's critique in Capital details precisely how the contradictions inherent within the capitalist mode of production produces a fundamental contradiction between the equality presupposed by exchange and the inequality via the exploitation of labour required to gain profit. So from the very onset, the kernel of inequality is already present within our political-economic system. And that inequality is the basis for much of the struggle between capital and labour and how surplus value is distributed.

On the one hand, workers are, in principle, "free to sell their labour under whatever conditions of contract (for whatever length of working day) they please" (30), which highlights the equality, freedom, and individuality characterizing exchange relations, recalling both Aristotle's argument that "exchange cannot take place without equality" and Marx's argument that "the circulation of commodities requires the exchange of equivalents" (19).

However, workers must also compete against one another in the labour market, where capitalists who are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive due to the coercive laws of competition purchase workers' labour time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), and who more often than not dictate the duration and conditions of labour workers must accept or else risk privation while seeking something better, putting workers at a disadvantage on an individual level. (28-30) (One of the main reasons I favour some kind of universal basic income is that it has the potential to empower workers, decommodify labour-power by helping free workers from absolute dependence on wage labour for subsistence, and enlarge the nonmarket social economy.)

The expansion of value in this process occurs via the production of surplus value by capitalists who employ wage labour, a social relation in which the worker — who gives up their rights to control over the production process, the product of their labour, and the added value incorporated in production — receives the value of their labour power and nothing else (42-3). And this is important because this is the point where the surplus value created in the labour process is appropriated by capitalists who are forced, due to the coercive laws of competition, to internalize the profit-seeking motive to purchase workers' labour time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), i.e., how they transform money (M) into commodities (C) and then back into money plus a surplus (M + ∆M), the added value being the result of the additional amount of labour time capitalists can extract/contract out of the worker in excess of what it takes for them to produce the value of the wages they receive.

More broadly speaking, however, workers generally seek (and one could rightly even say are compelled) to purchase commodities with the money they earn through their role in the production of commodities (C-M-C); and through the maintenance and reproduction of the working class (primarily through their role as consumers of commodities), the reproduction of capital is created. Surplus value, then, is produced via the production process and realized via market exchange, where workers as producers and consumers give of themselves twice to capital—first as what's conventionally viewed as unpaid labour and second as wages for commodities (as well as things like rent, etc.) (56).

One of the practical as well as philosophical issues I have with the capitalist mode of production, then, is the potential exploitation inherent within the system itself, which in its most extreme (and therefore most visible) forms can be found in things like prison labour and sweatshops, but according to the LTV is a characteristic of all forms of wage labour under capitalism.

In the Marxist sense, at least, exploitation refers to the worker's lack of ownership and/or distributive control over the surplus created by their labour. (That's why Marx defined slavery, feudalism, and capitalism as exploitative systems of production, i.e., in each, the producers/workers have no ownership and/or distributive control over the surplus created by their labour). In this sense, exploitation is an inherent part of the capitalist mode of production, which in turn, ties into Marx's theory of alienation.

It's rather complicated, and I don't fully understand everything Marx wrote on the subject as much of it is very abstract, but in short, exploitation is the idea that the capitalist profits far more from a worker's labour than the worker does, and it doesn't really matter whether it's voluntary or not. Moreover, this type of social relationship ultimate debases labour and impedes our positive development as a species.

Adam Smith et al. assumed that labour creates wealth (surplus value). But according to Marx, in a capitalist system, labour itself becomes a commodity, an object that's bought and sold on the market. Moreover, due to private ownership of the means of production, the product of the worker's labour doesn't legally belong to them (alienation), nor does the surplus value their labour creates (unpaid labour), which is kept by the capitalist. Consequently, the product of the worker's labour becomes a commodity that's divorced from the labour expended on its production, thereby obscuring the social relationship between producer and consumer (commodity fetishism).

Furthermore, the employer has the ability to increase their profit exponentially by reinvesting the surplus value extracted from the worker's labour into their company while the labourer is forced to spend their (more often than not) meager wages on the necessities of life such as food, clothing, shelter, etc.

For Marx, our ability to produce things, especially our means of subsistence, is what sets us apart from other animals. In his view, this ability to produce objects is a part of our essence as a human being. Put another way, Marx viewed human beings as productive creatures that, in the words of Jonathan Wolff, "are able to create according to our will and consciousness in a very elaborate way." But, as Wolff continues, "workers under capitalism, Marx thinks, very rarely have the opportunity to express these powers. So, Marx says, from a human being, the worker is reduced to an abstract activity and a stomach. So rather than being a human being able to express our essence, we are like little machines ourselves."

And I think understanding this point of view is integral to understanding an important part of Marx's critique of production under the capitalist system, which he argues not only estranges and alienates the worker's relationship to the products of their labour, but estranges and alienates the worker's relationship to the act of production itself.

In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argues that under the capitalist system of production, the worker's labour becomes "external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind." As a consequence, the worker "only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor."

And when viewed from this perspective, it may become easier to understand why Marx saw labour within the context of capitalism as something debasing, particularly for the worker, and why it's ultimately an impediment to achieving self-realization as a species in the sense of resolving "the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species" that's characterized by the "positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement."

From an ethical standpoint, this inherently disparate relationship between capital and labour reminds me of a line from a letter written by Abigail Adams in the spring of 1776 to her husband: "I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow-creatures of theirs [referring to slave-holding Virginians]. Of this I am certain, that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principle of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us."

And I think the same sentiment can easily be applied to capital in relation to the wage labourer, at least in the sense of how the latter is coerced under the capitalist mode of production to surrender their labour-power to the former in exchange for their means of subsistence, which is always less than what they actually produce, as well as all rights over the product of their labour.

In essence, from one point of view, both slavery and wage labour can be seen to infringe upon individual autonomy in their respective ways, with former more obviously so, but the latter no less potentially oppressive from the standpoint of labour. Friedrich Engels, in The Principles of Communism, compared the two social relations, writing: "The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence."

Moreover, the logic of the system, via what Marx termed the 'coercive laws of competition,' forces the hand of capital to exploit labour as much as it can; and at the same time, labour is coerced into the position of working for a wage and fighting for gains that capital quickly counter in an endless struggle punctuated by regular economic crises (these days better known as the 'business cycle'), creating continuous class antagonisms between capital and labour.

Hence much of what's historically been labelled as Marxism and/or socialism has been a search for practical as well as philosophical resolutions to these issues, which isn't to be found in things like equality of wealth or outcomes so much as the de-privatization (i.e., socialization) of opportunity and the weakening of class antagonisms and hierarchies arising out of social relations unique to capitalism and other predominately exploitative systems.

As Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy, "Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." And Marx's focus, along with socialist movements in general, is in attempting to answer the question of how to liberate society from the suffering and alienation engendered by these political-economic contradictions and inequalities by changing the material conditions that support it.

In the words of Erich Fromm, "[Marx's] concept of socialism is the emancipation from alienation, the return of man to himself, his self-realization," a goal that's ultimately achievable via "the liberation of man from a kind of work which destroys his individuality, which transforms him into a thing, and which makes him into the slave of things" (Marx's Concept of Man). And to do that, to realize this form of socio-economic liberation, the working class needs to theoretically "unravel the constraints to the free application of human labour" (to steal a phrase from Harvey) in an effort to practically "'expropriate the expropriators' and so to achieve the conscious reconstruction of the value form through collective action" (38).

my first concert

Holy shit, Morbid Angel is coming next week and playing the entire Covenant album to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its release! Even though I have to work the next day at 6:30am, there's no way I'm missing this.

Covenant is one of the best death metal albums ever made. The first time I heard "Rapture" on Headbanger's Ball, I was young, rebellious, and fancied myself quite the little Satanist. It was the heaviest, most Satanic thing I'd ever heard, and I couldn't get enough of it. I listened to that tape religiously. When I heard they were playing at the Falcon Club in Hamtramck, MI, I knew I had to go.

It was the summer of 1994. I was all of 15 and crashing on my friend Mike's couch at the time. I remember that we had to go to some record store or another to buy the tickets. My friend Larry was there too. We convinced somebody to give us a ride down there that night (maybe Jerry, or someone's mom?). I remember waiting outside and hearing them rehearse "Sworn to the Black." It gave me chills. I was so fucking excited I was practically twerking with anticipation.

The place was small and more like a basement than a venue. 7,000 Dying Rats and Crowbar opened. Then Morbid Angel came on and fucking destroyed my face with the heaviest riffs and most devilish lyrics my relatively innocent, young ears had until that time heard (this was before the interwebs, mind you). It was one hell of a show. I headbanged so hard I'm pretty sure I gave myself whiplash.

After the show, we tried to find a ride back, but ended up having to catch a taxi instead. Unfortunately, we could only afford to make it halfway back to Mike's place, walking the last 5 or 6 miles in the dead of night.

And that's how Morbid Angel became the first band I ever saw live.

democrats aren't a leftist alternative

From ThinkProgress:

State Rep. Uses Sledgehammer To Destroy Homeless People’s Possessions

Yet more attacks on the homeless by the state; and this time it's a literally attack on their personal possessions by a Democratic representative from Hawaii, where lawmakers have apparently also "approved $100,000 over the next two years to offer one-way flights off the islands to any of the state’s estimated 17,000 homeless persons."

In my opinion, this is just another example of a growing trend of state-led attacks on the property-less that crosses party lines. If you're not a housed wage labourer, you're shit out of luck. In Portland, for example, which has a Democratic mayor, city council, and is in a Democratic state, they've repeatedly tried to pass sit-lie ordinances in order to harass homeless people by forcing them to move if they're sitting or lying anywhere downtown at anytime; and they've also taken to filling in underpasses with boulders to prevent homeless people from sleeping there at night.

When push comes to shove, Democrats are just as friendly towards the down-and-out as Republicans because each is a political representation of capital and holds bourgeois property relationships sacrosanct. The former may pay lip service to the working class by supporting things like food assistance programs and Social Security (when they're not busy joining with Republicans to cut social programs at any rate), but many of these programs themselves are really just means of subsidizing cheap labour, not ending poverty, de-privatizing opportunity, or weakening the class antagonisms and hierarchies arising out of capitalist social relations.

Like most forms of government centered around private property rights, the basic principle behind the establishment of our form of representative democracy had more to do with the ruling elites wanting to protect the small minority of property owners (including themselves) from the majority of the property-less than anything else (e.g., see Federalist No. 10). While they may disagree on the approach, both Democrats and Republicans are capitalist parties that seek to keep the capitalist profit-making machine rolling.

Case in point. Despite all of his left-leaning rhetoric prior to the 2008 election, Obama is (and always was) clearly a centrist, and he has no qualms about courting capital, from talking about lowering the corporate tax rate and how his healthcare boondoggle is based on "the private marketplace" (which is a handout to private insurance companies as opposed to a not-for-profit, single payer system like they have in most other advanced industrialized nations), to bragging about the vitality of the stock market (until the next crisis of overaccumulation, of course).

He's right when he says he's no socialist; and the Democratic Party isn't a leftist alternative. In fact, they're essentially the conservatives of yesteryear.

rtw legislation is anti-union, not pro-worker

Right-to-work legislation aimed specifically at public sector unions is on track to hit Oregon ballots next November. While the term 'right-to-work' may sound positive, it actually represents a way for corporations and pro-business advocates to further weaken already beleaguered labour unions by cutting off their primary source of funding while at the same time forcing them, via existing state law, to represent workers who opt out of paying any union dues or 'fair share' fees.

As with any other kind of organization that provides benefits to its members, labour unions depend on a steady source of funds to function effectively. Workers who work at a unionized workplace pay a small percentage of each check to the union since they benefit from the terms of the union-negotiated contract said union has worked out with the employer. That money goes directly towards funding union representation in the workplace, as well as political advocacy in the broader political sphere if authorized by the worker.

By allowing workers to opt out of paying dues while still mandating that the union represent them, you essentially drain the union of one of its most vital resources. In fact, this very argument is made by the Chamber of Commerce, a strong proponent of right to work legislation across the country, when demanding members of the organization to pay dues or else lose access to the benefits they provide. In a letter responding to the Owensboro Building and Construction Trades Council's inquiry about continued membership benefits without paying dues, for example, the local Chamber of Commerce wrote that "the vast majority of the Chamber's annual revenues come from member dues, and it would be unfair to the other 850+ members to allow an organization not paying dues to be included in member benefits." Yet that's exactly what they want unions to do.

Proponents frame this bill as promoting choice, freedom, and even civil rights, basically arguing that unions force workers who don't want to be members to pay fair share fees, which they say restricts the individual worker's freedom to not pay such fees. Hence right-to-work legislation is portrayed as 'freeing' workers from the oppression of 'greedy' labour unions that force workers to financially contribute to their operation.

This argument, however, ignores the fact that most employers restrict an individual worker's freedom far more than the payment of union dues does, and they certainly don't seem all that keen to support anything that gives workers more freedom from the oppression of their 'greedy' employers. (It's also interesting to note that the same people often argue workers have the freedom to find a different job if they don't like the one they have and/or their employer, yet they curiously fail to extend this argument to workers having the freedom to find a different job if they don't want to work at a unionized workplace or pay union dues.)

Moreover, it neglects the fact that these dues are in a sense an obligation of the worker's, i.e., it's a payment on the part of the worker to the union for services rendered (the union's advocacy, protection, the contract it helped to negotiate that the worker benefits from, etc.), an exchange most pro-business advocates hold sacred in every other circumstance.

In essence, they're using legislation to restrict the freedom of unions to negotiate and agree to certain contract provisions in order to make unionized workers more free, which is kind of like giving with one hand and taking with the other. If this proposed measure passes, it could undermine their means of collecting funds and severely hamper their ability to lobby lawmakers on behalf of working Oregonians, giving corporate lobbyists an unfair political advantage and hurting workers in the long run.

iran's economy crippled by sanctions - why that's not necessarily a good thing

What I took away from this press conference is: the US is the arbitrator of who gets to have what in the world, and we've crippled Iran's day-to-day economy, making life for the average Iranian extremely fucking difficult. To many, is seems like the idea of imposing economic sanctions against other regimes in order to get them to comply with our demands is ethically justified, even if those sanctions ultimately just hurt the people and not the regime. I, on the other hand, disagree and find them to be barbaric to say the least since the whole point of sanctions is to hurt the people enough for them to pressure/topple said regimes.

Moreover, ethicalities aside, they have the potential to engender the opposite in the sense that regimes can use the suffering caused by sanctions to strengthen their power and justify their actions, turning the people against economic aggressor. "See? They're hurting 'you' by these sanctions; they're really 'your' enemy despite their rhetoric of freedom and justice and we'll fight to defend 'you.'" Meanwhile, innocent people go hungry and the leaders of these regimes usually stay in power (e.g., North Korea, Iran, etc.).

The issue of Iran's nuclear developments is a serious and complex one, though, and it's easy to see why the US is so concerned about the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon. For one, it might instigate a nuclear arms race in the Middle East (although everyone knows Israel has them and it hasn't done so). Iran also has a pretty negative image in general, and has been accused of supporting terrorism. In addition, it'd almost certainly bring the tension between Iran and Israel to a boiling point and potentially trigger a preemptive military strike by Israel, which has repeated threatened to do so, most likely with our support. It may even trigger a military response by the US itself.

I think that attacking Iran would be an extremely rash and stupid idea, however. For one, it'll only reinforce the image of America as an international bully attacking yet another predominately Muslim nation, which will further radicalize people against us, particularly in the Middle East even if our ally, Israel, is the actual aggressor since everyone knows that we share close tactical relations and supply them with arms. This could not only instigate a fresh wave of terrorist attacks, but a full on global conflict. Moreover, both China and Russia are important trading partners with Iran, which would further strain relations between us and them, and could quite possibly instigate another cold war-style military buildup, especially with China as they won't appreciate our or our allies' militaristic forays into one of their main petroleum watering holes.

I'm honestly a bit confused about what's truly going on, though. The rhetoric coming out of Israel and from certain talking-heads in Washington make it seem as if a nuclear-armed Iran is immanent. However, according to statements made by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta last year, Iran isn't developing nuclear weapons at the moment, only a 'nuclear capability.' While vague as to what that means, it could very well be for energy independence, as Iran asserts. If it's true that they're not currently developing nuclear weapons, what the hell is this really all about then? US hegemony? Oil? A fear of an energy-independent Iran?

This whole thing also raises the question, Do we have the right to prevent a country from developing nuclear energy simply because we're afraid they may one day use that technology to produce nuclear weapons? Obviously we think we do, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world necessarily agrees; and this is where even more future conflicts could potentially arise now that the nuclear cat is out of the bag and more and more countries begin to pursue this technology (North Korea being the newest addition to the club). Also, countries who don't necessarily want to pursue nuclear weapons may still not appreciate the US declaring who can do so.

In addition, we hear a lot of talk about the threat from Iran; but we rarely hear about our threat to Iran, from our role in the 1953 CIA-organized coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, to our placement of military bases in the Middle East that literally surround Iran. So even assuming that all this talk about Iran pursuing nuclear weapons is true, can you really blame them? I mean, looking at it objectively, if I were them, I'd probably be a little paranoid about the US and want some kind of strategic deterrent, too.

All in all, it's a fucking mess, and I don't foresee an amiable solution any time soon. In fact, I see this biting us in the ass like most of our repeated interventions in the Middle East in the last 60 years or so. At some point, however, I think we, as a nation, need to take a critical look at our role in the world and the problems our fairly aggressive foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, has caused. We're not as innocent in this as we may like to believe, and we can't continue to ignore the fact that our actions have a serious impact in a world where we're one of the dominant powers.

To use the old cliché, with great power comes great responsibility; and frankly, we haven't been all that responsible with our 'superpower' status, especially when it comes to trying to make the Middle East submit to our regional hegemony. Unlike Spider-man, who realized early on, after the death of his uncle, that his selfish pursuits and flagrant use of his superpowers had serious and often tragic consequences, we haven't seemed to grasp that lesson yet, and continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. And while mistakes in some shape or form will always be made, we have to own up to ours and truly learn from them if we're ever going to help put an end to this self-perpetuating cycle of violence.

common sense optimism

The other day, someone brought up an interesting quote from part two of Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, attacking the notion of monarchy and hereditary forms of succession, and asked which came first, oppression as a result of wealth or oppression as means of accumulation? Paine writes:

MANKIND being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance: the distinctions of rich and poor may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice. Oppression is often the CONSEQUENCE, but seldom or never the MEANS of riches; and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

To me, it seems as if Paine is taking the position that riches (i.e., wealth inequality) came first in the form of "the distinctions of rich and poor" — which is a knowledge reminiscent of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis — and with it, the consequence of oppression, the latter rarely being the means of acquiring riches.

I'm a bit surprised Paine would take that position, though. For one, he seems to have grasped that property rights create a dispossessed class, and with it, the distinctions of rich and poor (which can be viewed as a legal form of state-backed oppression, and which evokes Jean-Jacques Rousseau's proposition in his 1754 work, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, that the establishment of property can be seen as the beginning of the evils of rivalry, competition, and the desire of profiting at the expense of others). In his 1797 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, for example, Paine proposed the radical idea of a basic income guarantee for all US citizens as compensation for "loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."

Of course, he wrote that two decades after Common Sense. However, the oppression exhibited by the British government and the East India Company alone in their quest for, and acquisition of, riches was one of the primary motivations for the American Revolution, and something Paine and the other revolutionaries were well aware of at the time, so it makes me wonder if that statement wasn't more ideologically inspired than historically motivated. He was attacking the concept of monarchy and hereditary succession from both a biblical and historical perspective, after all.

It does raise the question, though, of which came first, inequality or oppression. Rather than a 'chicken or egg' scenario, however, I think it's more a case of chicken and egg, especially when talking about capitalism and bourgeois social forms.

On the one hand, we can see that riches/wealth inequality in the economic sphere is carried into the political sphere since the accumulation of profit on the part of capital/the wealthy in the form of money, which itself is a form of social power, gives capital/the wealthy (particularly as a class) a disproportionate political advantage. This, of course, puts poorer people and the working class at a disadvantage on a broader political level, whether via legislation or outright state violence, as the state itself is the political representation of capital, the social relation, that subsumes the capitalist class and working class alike, and which seeks to help resolve the reoccurring crises of overaccumulation that result from the intrinsic contradictions within the capitalist mode of production itself. From this point of view, oppression can be the consequence of riches.

Looking at the inverse, primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession, which are grosser forms of political-economic oppression, and economic exploitation stemming from a social relation in which the worker — who gives up their rights to control over the production process, the product of their labour, and the value incorporated in the production — receives the value of their labour power and nothing else, which is a much subtler forms of oppression, are sources of riches in the form of means for the appropriation of surplus value by capital and the ruling class. From this point of view, oppression can be the means of riches (and in the case of primitive accumulation, it can even be argued that oppression in this form was the 'original sin' rather than riches).

So, looking at it this way, oppression can be both the cause and consequence of riches, and I think the relationship is reciprocal rather than causal (especially since I'm not a fan of first cause arguments). To use a Buddhist metaphor, it's as if two sheaves of reeds were to stand leaning against one another. If one were to pull away one of those sheaves of reeds, the other would fall; if one were to pull away the other, the first one would fall.

And this leads me to another thing that bothers me about this. As Paine infers in the opening sentence of his attack on monarchy, the idea of one being the consequence of the other essentially presupposes that there was a period in our evolution as a species when there was no oppression or inequality, a proverbial Garden of Eden in which neither was known until the arising of one, inequality and distinctions of rich and poor (due to the instigation of a wicked serpent, perhaps) begat the other, oppression.

I'm not convinced that such a time existed, however, and I think these things evolved in tandem throughout history, along with things like cooperation, generosity, and egalitarianism. Although, to be fair to Paine and the point he was trying to make about the existence of a more equal state of affairs prior to the existence of monarchy and hereditary succession, many of the more 'primitive' societies we've studied (i.e., hunter-gatherer societies) do seem to have more egalitarian social structures than we have in our more 'civilized' societies, which leads me to believe that our ancient ancestors may have had similar, egalitarian social structure, just not as idealized as they're sometimes made out to be.

In essence, I believe that, as a species, we're neither a perfect nor fallen creation; we're the product of material forces that have evolved into creative and producing beings, and through the social nature of that creative and productive activity, we collectively create our nature, our social consciousness, our reality. And because of this, we're not simply limited to a modern world characterized by oppression and distinctions of rich and poor dominated by an aristocracy of wealthy capitalists and moneyed corporations instead of kings.

It may seem like there's no alternative, that we've reached the 'end of history' and the final phase of our socio-cultural evolution; but I honestly think we have the capacity to create a world characterized by equality and material abundance in which things like distinctions of rich and poor and oppression truly become superfluous.

wealth inequality in america

The statistics in this video about wealth inequality are pretty shocking to many. For one, it creatively illustrates the fact that the top 1% alone controls about 40% of the total wealth of the US, while the bottom 80% only has 7% of that wealth shared between them, statistics that are a lot worse than people think they are. But the statistics themselves aren't the full story, and I think it's worth digging deeper to find out what that story is. I'm sure some will disagree with my particular answers, but the two main questions that I think need to be asked are: 'Why is there so much disparity when it comes to wealth distribution?' and 'Where does all that wealth come from in the first place?'

In answer to the latter, I think we need to begin by taking a broader look at history and the evolution of capitalism, which has succeeded in greatly increasing both wealth and the efficiency of commodity production. For starters, I think it's worth noting that much of the wealth we're talking about has its roots in theft and violence, i.e., the primitive accumulation of capital in the form of colonialism and imperialism. The initial 'start up' capital for many early capitalists and industrializing nations came from the expropriation and consumption of the labour and resources of other places, particularly large parts of Africa, the Americas, and Asia. And here I'm talking about everything from land grabs to slave labour. Today, we do similar things via more civilized methods such as sweatshops and the IMF, which forces countries experiencing economic instability to adopt certain favourable policies (to the US and Europe, at least) in exchange for financial loans, etc.

Wealth is also created via the capitalist mode of commodity production, which is why capitalism was a revolutionary mode of production that eventually supplanted feudalism. The logic of capitalism spurs both the production of surplus value (which is where profits come from) and constant evolutions in technology, and this has both positive and negative consequences. One positive is that capitalism has revolutionized production methods, and the drive for the accumulation of profit constantly pushes the development of new and labour-saving technologies. A negative is that the internal contradictions in the capitalist mode of production create crises that cause economic instability, and capitalist social relations are a major source of inequality.

I'd concede that some of the wealth inequality we're currently experiencing (at least in the West) is due to polices and laws that have weakened unions, eroded the minimum wage to the lowest level (in real terms) since the 1950s, put Wall Street’s toxic innovations ahead of workers, etc. Nevertheless, I'd strongly argue that a great deal of this inequality is a direct result of the way capitalism functions and the social forms (including the state) that that functioning engenders. I think our politics have always been 'sick' in the sense that they've always dominated by the interests of a privileged class of wealthy, ruling class elites — whether it's been the white, male landowners of the late 1700s or the 1% of today — and their ownership of the means of production and finance give them the means to appropriate the lion's share of wealth, whether created or simply expropriated from elsewhere (i.e., accumulation by dispossession).

This seed of inequality, however, is easily obscured, as are capitalist social relations and the origin of profit, which from the Marxist perspective, arises out of the division of the workday into necessary labour and surplus labour. But since all labour appears as paid labour, it's easy for the capitalist apologist to argue that capital is the source of value (essentially separating capital as an independent and autonomous factor of production) despite the actual complexity of capitalist production and distribution, completely obscuring labour's contribution in the creation and realization of profit.

But as David Harvey illustrates in Limits to Capital, part of Marx's critique in Capital details precisely how the contradictions inherent within the capitalist mode of production produces a fundamental contradiction between the equality presupposed by exchange and the inequality via the exploitation of labour required to gain profit. So from the very onset, the kernel of inequality is already present within our political-economic system. And that inequality is the basis for much of the struggle between capital and labour and how surplus value is distributed.

On the one hand, workers are, in principle, "free to sell their labour under whatever conditions of contract (for whatever length of working day) they please" (30), which highlights the equality, freedom, and individuality characterizing exchange relations, recalling both Aristotle's argument that "exchange cannot take place without equality" and Marx's argument that "the circulation of commodities requires the exchange of equivalents" (19).

However, workers must also compete against one another in the labour market, where capitalists who are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive due to the coercive laws of competition purchase workers' labour time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), and who more often than not dictate the duration and conditions of labour workers must accept or else risk privation while seeking something better, putting workers at a disadvantage on an individual level. (28-30) (One of the main reasons I favour some kind of universal basic income is that it has the potential to empower workers, decommodify labour-power by helping free workers from absolute dependence on wage labour for subsistence, and enlarge the nonmarket social economy.)

The expansion of value in this process occurs via the production of surplus value by capitalists who employ wage labour, a social relation in which the worker — who gives up their rights to control over the production process, the product of their labour, and the value incorporated in the production — receives the value of their labour power and nothing else (42-3). And this is important because this is the point where the surplus value created in the labour process is appropriated by capitalists who are forced, due to the coercive laws of competition, to internalize the profit-seeking motive to purchase workers' labour time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), i.e., how they transform money (M) into commodities (C) and then back into money plus a surplus (M + ∆M), the added value being the result of the additional amount of labour time capitalists can extract/contract out of the worker in excess of what it takes for them to produce the value of the wages they receive.

More broadly speaking, however, workers generally seek (and one could rightly even say are compelled) to purchase commodities with the money they earn through their role in the production of commodities (C-M-C); and through the maintenance and reproduction of the working class (primarily through their role as consumers of commodities), the reproduction of capital is created. Surplus value, then, is produced via the production process and realized via market exchange, where workers as producers and consumers give of themselves twice to capital—first as what's conventionally viewed as unpaid labour and second as wages for commodities (as well as things like rent, etc.) (56).

And that inequality in the economic sphere is further carried into the political sphere since the accumulation of profit on the part of capital in the form of money, which itself is a form of social power, gives capital (particularly as a class) a disproportionate political advantage, putting workers at a disadvantage on a broader political level. In addition, the more workers collectively resist the depredations of capital, the "more the capitalists are forced to constitute themselves as a class to ensure collectively that the conditions for progressive accumulation are preserved" (30). (And the state is primarily the political representation of capital, the social relation, that subsumes the capitalist class and working class alike, and which seeks to help resolve the reoccurring crises of overaccumulation that result from the intrinsic contradictions within the capitalist mode of production itself.)

Of course, one can always look at the numbers and argue that the massive wealth in the hands of the uber-rich is simply due to the amount of the proverbial pie being a lot bigger than in the past, and that the ends of increased wealth (assuming it's not just inflationary numbers we're talking about here) and evolutions in technology justify the means (which include a lot of ugly truths), especially from the relative comfort of the US, which has appropriated and expropriated a vast quantity of global wealth that's trickled down to its working class. But I think it's misleading to look at the size of the pie without also looking at how the slices are distributed and where the ingredients come from.

some rambling thoughts on the magic mountain

Since I loved the book, I decided to rent Hans Geissendörfer's adaptation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain the other night. As I watched it, it got me thinking that the contradiction between illness and working life in The Magic Mountain is, perhaps on an unconscious level, a reflection of the contradiction between the natural tendency towards an increase in non-work or leisure time (or as Karl Marx puts it in Capital, "time ... for the free development, intellectual and social, of the individual") arising from the technological advancements and socialization of labour spurred by capitalism and the capitalist class' own push to increase labour time in its collective drive for the accumulation of profit.

In essence, if one views the book from this perspective, the former can be seen as speaking to the underlying contradictions in the latter and the conflict it engenders in Hans Castorp's consciousness in the wake of German industrial development preceding WWI. From this point of view, then, Catorp's voracious interest in studying things like anatomy, astronomy, botany, physiology, etc. while a resident of the International Sanatorium Berghof isn't simply induced by, say, boredom, but more reminiscent of Marx's passage in The German Ideology concerning the liberation of the working class from the confinement of capitalist social relations:

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the "general interest," but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

Throughout his seven year stay, Castorp consistently fights against/ignores Ludovico Settembrini's constant push to return to the flatlands and begin his [productive] career as a ship builder. He even taunts Castorp by giving him the nickname 'engineer.' Castorp, despite his Protestant, middle-class upbringing, however, resigns to stay until 'well,' a vague designation that has seemingly little to do with his physical health and more to do with his mental well-being. He leaves only when forced to by the onset of WWI, not to assume his role as a surplus-producing proletariat.

In this, one can see in Castorp the Protestant work ethic clashing with what may very well be a simmering proto-communist consciousness (i.e., "a consciousness," in the words of blogger Jehu, "of the need for a fundamental revolution of society"), a conflict between the 'false consciousness' arising from what Herbert Marcuse describes as the ideology which "belongs to the established societal apparatus," being "a requisite for its continuous functioning and part of its rationality," and the proletarian consciousness "of common class situation" struggling to manifest itself.

Castorp ultimately rejects Leo Naphta's communistic terror, but seemingly dies on the battlefield in the first industrial/world war in the service of Settembrini's bourgeois republicanism, leaving the question of the resolution open. It leaves me to wonder if the resolution to this contradiction is the social emancipation of the individual via the emancipatory transcendence of capitalism—not through Naphta's peculiar authoritarian terror, but through a combination of the natural, material evolution of capitalism (i.e., the reduction of socially necessary labour to an absolute minimum) and a corresponding evolution in thought (i.e., a leap in the consciousness of the social producers leading to the abolition of the state and the global institution of the free association of individuals).

Although Mann's sympathies clearly lie with Settembrini and his bourgeois humanism/liberalism, I think Castorp's vacillation between the influences of Settembrini and Naphta reflects a vacillation in Mann's own consciousness as he transitioned from conservatism to liberalism in the course of writing the book, as well as foreshadowing the internal contradictions between his future advocacy of social democracy and his bourgeois-aristocratic views (e.g., democracy being a "justified demand from below" but even more beautiful when it's "good will, generosity, and love coming from the top down").

I think this approach to reading The Magic Mountain gives it an interesting dynamic, at any rate, which reflects the difficulties, in literary form, of seeing through the 'fetishism of the realm of appearances' and apprehending both the underlying dynamics of, and ideological justifications for, the political-economic system we currently live within.

from surplus value to the state as national capitalist: some rambling thoughts on marxist stuff

Every once in a while, I find the time to pick up David Harvey's Limits to Capital and read a chapter or two, which really impresses upon me the complexities of the capitalist mode of production, as well as my own rather simplistic understanding of that process. It's easy to forget that Marx's Capital describes the logic of capitalism in its totality, that his penetrative critique is much deeper than merely unequal employer/employee social relations.

Take, for instance, the production and realization of surplus value and profit. While the exploitation of an employee by an employer can be a source of surplus-value extraction at a specific point of production, and which can be a source of profit for said employer, Marx's analysis goes much further than this and details how the realization of surplus value and profit is often (and perhaps even primarily) realized via the whole process of capitalist commodity production.

Production and distribution themselves aren't discrete, autonomous spheres as they're sometimes treated; they are, in the context of capitalist society, part of an organic whole. Moreover, the expansion of value in this process occurs via the production of surplus value by capitalists who employ wage labour, a social relation in which the worker — who gives up their rights to control over the production process, the product of their labour, and the value incorporated in the production — receives the value of their labour power and nothing else (42-3).

And this is important because this is the point where the surplus value created in the labour process is appropriated by capitalists who are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive due to the coercive laws of competition to purchase workers' labour time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), i.e., how they transform money (M) into commodities (C) and then back into money plus a surplus (M + ∆M), the added value being the result of the additional amount of labour time capitalists can extract/contract out of the worker in excess of what it takes for them to produce the value of the wages they receive.

More broadly speaking, however, workers generally seek (and one could rightly even say compelled) to purchase commodities with the money they earn through their role in the production of commodities (C-M-C); and through the maintenance and reproduction of the working class (primarily through their role as consumers of commodities), the reproduction of capital is created. Surplus value, then, is produced via the production process and realized via market exchange, where workers as producers and consumers give of themselves twice to capital—first as what's conventionally viewed as unpaid labour and second as wages for commodities (as well as things like rent, etc.) (56).

So it's not simply limited to a single exchange between capitalist and worker, but between the overall interaction between the capitalist and working classes as a whole. Distribution, then, can be seen as the mediation point between the creation of surplus value and its realization in exchange, which means that even national boundaries are no impediment to this process.

But within this process, there are a number of contradictions that give rise to imbalances and crises. And when due to these, both the mass of superfluous (i.e., unproductive) capital and labour increase in conjunction with efficiencies in production, they cause the rate of profit to fall and a shrinkage in the absolute mass of profit created, compelling capitalists to find ways to overcome this, whether through encouraging debt spending, the opening of new markets, the 'creative destruction' of superfluous capital (mostly through state consumption), or creating ways to increase the mass of profit that via evolutions (i.e., innovations) in the means of production and finance that, in turn, set up the conditions for further overaccumulation and crises.

From a Marxist perspective, I think these material conditions tend to affect and ultimately direct both domestic and foreign economic policies far more than political ideologies despite how these issues are often framed by the media or politicians. And this, in my opinion, goes a long way towards explaining, among other things, Washington's growing role as national capitalist a la Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific—and here I'm thinking specifically about Jehu's analysis of Washington's increasing role as manager of the national capital/surplus absorber on a global scale.

There's a silver lining to all of this, however. If we except the arguments of Engels and Jehu, then Washington's ever-growing role in managing the productive forces of society signals that the productive forces of society are developed enough, and the social nature of production pervasive enough, for the socialized character of the means of production to be given "complete freedom to work itself out," meaning a possible end to wage labour and the beginning of a new historical epoch.

upasika day in white salmon

I finally managed to work up the courage Friday night to ask someone if I could catch a ride with them to the Pacific Hermitage in White Salmon, WA, and make my first (and very long overdo) visit. After a rough few weeks and what seemed like auspicious timing (it not only being a full moon observance day, but Pavarana, the full moon marking the end of the monastic rains retreat, as well), I made the determination to attend the Upasika Day retreat at Yoga Samadhi. My hope was that spending the day meditating with monks would help me get out of the dark mental cave I've found myself in recently.

The next morning was covered in a blanket of mist, the setting moon peeking through on its way towards the horizon, and I found myself looking forward to the coming day. Scott and Joan from Portland Friends of the Dhamma were kind enough to pick me up on the way from their home in Lake Oswego to the hermitage, and the three of us set out into the October fog a little before 9am. We talked a bit on the way, and by the time we got close to the hermitage, the mist had cleared revealing a perfect fall day, brisk yet sunny, the colours of autumn painting the Columbia Gorge with a vibrant spectrum of green, yellow, orange, and bright red.

We arrived at the hermitage just after 10am, which is nestled in a beautifully forested and relatively secluded area along the Jewlett Creek. We unloaded the food we brought for the meal offering and then offered to help with anything that needed to be done around the hermitage. A few people, including a couple of the monks, spent the next hour raking leaves, while I was conscripted to mow a portion of the grounds since the Vinaya, the monastic rules of discipline, doesn't allow monks to damage or destroy plants (although it's technically only a minor offense entailing a confession to another monk). Afterwards, we gathered in the hermitage to cleanup and offer the daily meal. I ate my meal outside with Charla and Alistair (also from PFoD) and a family of quails.

Once the meal was over and everything was cleared away, we migrated to Yoga Samadhi in downtown White Salmon for the half-day retreat. I took the opportunity to walk from the hermitage to Yoga Samadhi with Alistair along the same path through the woods that the monks take on their alms round, and as we walked, he showed me some points of interest (like the monk's kutis and adjoining walking paths and the two rock formations that one of the monks humourously named Moggallana and Sariputta) and told me a bit about the land and the hermitage's history. We arrived at Yoga Samadhi a little after 1pm, just in time for the formal requesting of the precepts and morning chanting.

Chanting was followed by alternating periods of sitting and walking mediation for the next five hours. I sat. I walked. My mind ran the gambut of mental states like a monkey swinging through a forest wilderness, rarely resting on one branch for very long before swinging off the next. A good lesson on annica. My body hurt here, then there, then here and there. A good lesson on dukkha. And during the Dhamma discussion, Ajahn Sudanto mentioned that our main strategy to the experience of dukkha is to try to control and manipulate things to be other than their nature, but that's a trap. A good lesson on anatta.

happy indigenous peoples' day (my yearly columbus day rant)

Sigh. Another year, another Columbus Day and its onslaught of Columbus Day sales (a fitting way to commemorate hundreds of years of greed and oppression, don't you think?).

Why this is still a national holiday is beyond me. Out of all our national holidays, I think this one pisses me off the most. Essentially, it celebrates a man who not only 'discovered' land that was already inhabited (Hispaniola), but a person who helped to literally wipe that land of its original inhabitants, the peaceful Arawaks, through his unbelievable cruelty, and that of those who followed him to the 'New World' (which itself is a very Eurocentric designation).

The Arawaks initially greeted Columbus and his crew with gifts and open arms. Of them, Columbus himself writes things like, "They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest—without knowledge of what is evil—nor do they murder or steal ... they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world ... always laughing" and "They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked for it. They exhibit great love toward all others in preference to themselves." As well as things like, "They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

While simply passing judgment upon the actions of people long since dead doesn't serve much of a purpose, I think it's important to at least remember them and accept that they form an integral part of our nation's history, and a truly ugly part at that. I think this is especially important since the trend (particularly in school textbooks) has been to mythologize people like Columbus and their accomplishments while downplaying many of the negative things they also did, some of which were truly heinous acts. But these things shouldn't be glossed over, in my opinion; they should be reflected upon so that they're never forgotten—a reminder of the terrible price exacted by Mammon.

What happened to these poor people, and what eventually happened to numerous other tribes in the Americas, was nothing short of genocide; and I don't think we should celebrate the main architect of this inaugural (not to mention extremely brutal) land-grab as a hero with his own a national holiday. It not only dishonours the memory of the Arawaks and the other indigenous inhabitants who directly suffered at the hands of Columbus, his men, and those who followed, but I think it dishonours the descendants of all of the Americas' native inhabitants as well.

If anything, today should be renamed Indigenous Peoples' Day in their honour, and it should inspire us to do things to truly honour them like collectively pressuring the government to get rid of Columbus Day. Changing history text books to adequately address things such as what happened to the indigenous population of the Americas at the hands of European settlers, as well as the newly formed US, or else pressuring schools to use books like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States that do. Pressuring the government to officially apologize for the Indian Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, reneging on treaties, etc. And even more radical, pressuring the government to honour its treaties and return land that was stolen, or else fully compensate tribes for the land that was illegally taken from them.

None of that can bring back the dead, nor make up for the unimaginable amount of suffering and privation that's been inflicted upon the native inhabitants of the Americas since Columbus' arrival; but I think it's the least we can do. And for anyone reading this who may be unfamiliar with the full history behind Columbus Day, I recommend checking out this excerpt from Howard Zinn's Columbus and Western Civilization, as well as this clip from The Canary Effect and this article by Thomm Hartman. They'll give you a good idea of why today shouldn't celebrate Columbus Day, but condemn it.