DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

So, here we have a study that is designed to reward liberals for their enlightenment while ignoring that liberal tolerance is rather viciously racist.

Here’s what I find to be a problematic take of it in The Washington Post.

Never mind that, but what do you think about the fact that this ignores imperialism and colonialism? Is it any surprise the blue countries were settled by colonizers while the reddish nations like Korea and India were long occupied and rejected occupation as a matter of independence? It seems like the blue nations get to congratulate themselves for their forced integration that is long in the past while the red nations are being punished for their nationalism the result of recent independence. Not at all ignoring evident oppressive bigotries in India and Korea, just pointing out that using “wealth” is convenient and might highlight a bias in the research.

And France has a different conception of sovereignty and so I’m not at all surprised that reactionary whites are annoyed that immigrants of color are as French as they are. France is the outlier here, not Korea.

What do you all think?

Let’s dwell in the morass of mainstream American politics for a few minutes.

This is the story of children of wealthy Americans pretending to be bipartisan, centrist, millenials pretending to be concerned about poor people and growth calling for austerity, organizing to protect their inheritances and legacies, and carrying water for politicians who insist cutting the debt is important and that cutting social welfare and educational programs is the means to do it: read, keeping taxes low on the wealthy promotes growth while caring for the poor and under-privilege stifles growth.

Not at all funny. These freaks are so concerned about being called out about their wealthy, healthy privilege they’ve taken down their bios from a related org web page. The Can Kicks Back is partners with Fix the Debt—the propaganda/lobbying organization run by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson— and Concerned Youth of America, who were once proud of who they were, including bios and photos of their members, but have since taken that info offline. Let’s be clear about groups like Fix the Debt: bipartisanship in them is supposed to provide cover for austerity.

The idea that educated and knowledgable millenials would want austerity is fucking ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as the notions that millenials wrote and produced this embarrassing video:

dagNotes: A note about cooperation and work

I’m often asked about why I consider myself an anarchist by baffled colleagues and friends. I’m sure some of you can relate. Most people don’t really know what anarchism is, and I can’t really talk about theory because they won’t know any but the most famous names. That said, what I always end up talking about is labor, work, cooperation, and the rotten notions about work and business ethics in capitalist culture. If you read dagSeoul, you know I’m no individualist. I think the worst part of capitalist culture is its ability to convince members of society that they are free spirits who are embodied with specific skills that can be exploited for profit and social mobility as individuals better than in collaboration with others. I hate it when anarchists import this ethics of individuality into their politics.

We need a good critique of work—one that is not relegated to anarchist internet forums. Cooperation is a necessary part of work. We exchange our labor for much less than its worth. The exchange should provide benefits for less pay and increased production. Ideally, it does provide such benefits. I don’t need to explain what everyone knows: production has increased and continues to increase and workers are paid less, far less than they were, forty years ago, for doing the more work in, often, the same conditions. And the benefits? They’re now costs to be externalized as business owners make far more profits than they did decades ago.

Why work, why cooperate with employers and owners, when cooperation is a one-way street? We are taught, from childhood, that we must work. So, a vocal and forceful critique of work is necessary. It’s simple. We might wonder why no discourse, no conversation, no books are written about this. We have to know where to go to participate in the debate, and, to be frank, the pamphlets and theory is stale, and much of what is written about in online forums is shit.

I used to teach ethics for business majors as an adjunct in a philosophy department. It helped pay the bills and I got to lecture in philosophy, use that degree. BE USEFUL. It’s fucking everywhere, isn’t it? Anyway, I structured my course around the developing notions of the free market and ethics in capitalist society. Most people teach ethics for business majors by looking at ethical problems like the famous Ford Pintos that exploded when hit from behind case. I find that to be a silly way to teach ethics when the students, business majors though they are, don’t actually know what a market is and how it came to be defined the way it popularly is defined.

We read important texts about the nature of markets; we read philosophers, like Kant, who are responsible for framing Nature as an entity that has a special destiny for humans and our cities; we read about what it means to define business and how it’s different from work. We also read in the source material for what has become the common understanding of the individual. It will surprise many of you to learn that this did not mean reaching back to pre-modern philosophy and reading through The Enlightenment™. I spent a lot of time with students talking about Samuel Smiles and the formation of what we now refer to as family values and what were in the Victorian era called perennial virtues.

We must remember that the notions about self-help began as a public education about emerging bourgeois virtues about moderation that were meant to organize the working and middle classes—and get the working classes to struggle for sober and Christian upward mobility and the middle classes to participate in charity and public work for free as they struggle to become members of the employing classes. Thatcher and Reagan are important. They took the bourgeois virtues, with help from conservative intellectuals in the UK and US, and transformed them into transcendant values. They took ethics education about moderation and commonality, found in much Protestant culture, and bleached from it the commonality.

This is supposed to be a quick note, so I’ll just leave it at this. It’s ridiculous to continue to work for something—in this case, an ideal—we know is a fiction. It’s irrational to support an employment culture that insists the powerful employing classes are permitted to externalize the costs of cooperation by insisting, via contracts, that the employed classes bear the burden of externalization. It’s irrational to support this culture and call it a culture of cooperation. Upward mobility no longer exists.

If you have inherited your wealth, and many of you reading this are going to inherit, you need to think about this. Especially, all you bloggers who like to write about oppression. We don’t get to pick and choose the oppressions we focus on. We live in market societies. Proper intersectionality will always demand that class be a primary part of any discussion about anything else because under capitalist culture, we are first and formally organized into employing and employed classes under a system of formerly bourgeois virtues that have been fully institutionalized as pragmatic and universal values. It’s white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. All three together. And its values are the bedrock of your inheritances.  However, I’m also annoyed at all the anarchist insistence that we can maintain an individualist approach to struggle and succeed. What we need is class struggle and revolution. I’m firm about this.

dagNotes: On Wealth & Saying What You Mean.

Are you saying what you mean?

lukexvx:

The idea is not to create a redistribution of wealth, for wealth is the problem. The idea is a rejection of wealth.

jack-flack:

Just think of the irrational distribution of wealth in our society. Consider a professional baseball player who makes one million dollars per year; then consider a university custodian who makes twenty thousand dollars per year. What makes the baseball player’s role fifty times more valuable than the custodian’s is wealth production. Playing a game which offers little, if no, edification is certainly of no more genuine value than maintaining and up-keeping a university campus. If the fact that the baseball player is a millionaire while the custodian struggles to survive is not, in and of itself, evidence of our topsy-turvy system of wealth distribution, one would be hard-pressed to think of any situation in which wealth distribution has become unequal. has it gone too far when a small group of people become millionaires simply by filming themselves kicking one another in the genitals, or others become millionaires by having sex on camera, or a banker gets rich by transforming loans into profitable commodities—all this while the migrant laborer picks strawberries for twelve-to-sixteen hours per day for wages that barely provide for survival?

Amen!

Ok, but what is your definition of wealth? No offense, but I think your privileged (relative, I’m sure,) and Christian weltanschauung is showing.

We all know that talk of “destroying wealth” is a rather cheap way of talking about social and cultural revolution. It’s that simple. Problem is, social and cultural revolution don’t and won’t actually destroy wealth. Moreover, wealth is one of many presences that are sine qua non for Modern (and Medieval, for that matter,) Christianity. It’s there and, for many Protestants specifically, it has over a long two centuries, become itself a concrete reward for being Good Christians. See, The Prosperity Gospel, for example.

Also, you don’t want to use mindless binaries to talk about social inequalities, would you? In other words, I believe you’re trying to say so much more than something facile about those who possess wealth and those who don’t.

dagNotes: The rich can afford, the poor are at fault

The responses to the study claiming the rich are more likely to steal candy from a baby have been varied. Certainly, the discussion isn’t going to provide a consensus view about such research. On the other hand, the responses do illustrate, no matter what research suggests, we are more willing to believe poor people are at fault for being poor. In my opinion, this is an axiom for common sense discourse about American social being.

I’m going to flesh out some thinking about this in this note. Your thoughts are, as always, appreciated.

It’s almost always assumed the rich occupy a status they have earned.  And since we define class very much in opposition to other classes, the common sense response about the poor is that they have not earned poverty. What I’m getting at is there’s a good reason common sense discourse about poverty and wealth insists we should desire to be upwardly mobile citizens. After all, common sense will ask, Who would want to remain in an oppressive social position they haven’t earned? To remain poor seems irrational, unhealthy, undesirable. The problem with this sentiment is that being poor is not a failure of the will to not be poor, which is the same thing as saying being poor is not a failure of the will to be wealthier, any more than being wealthy represents a success of the will to succeed. We know that most wealth is simply not earned. It’s inherited. The same goes for poverty.  At any rate, this common sense discourse about an imaginary continuum that connects the rich and the poor permits a sense of direction for both upward mobility and charity, to becoming wealthy and providing for the poor.

So, to remain poor becomes a problem. After all, as the responses to the research illustrate, there are what are considered good reasons rich people would be expected to cheat more than poor people at some things. See Tyler Cowen’s strained explanation below.

Study: Rich more likely to take candy from babies (Ezra Klein, The Washington Post)

Greed Isn’t Good: Wealth Could Make People Unethical (Brandon Keim, Wired)

“More on whether the rich are jerks” Ezra Klein’s follow up on The Wonkblog

Are the rich bigger pricks than the rest of us? (Kevin Drum, Mother Jones)

How Good are the Upper Classes? (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution [blog])

On Crass Libertarianism: Wealth Redistribution

When you talk to a capitalist about taxes and government spending, inevitably the capitalist will want to begin speaking about wealth. A common conversation is that we, as in our government acting on behalf of citizens, should be promoting (spending on and investing in) wealth creation not wealth redistribution. Never mind that the claim is unreasonable. Specifically, business owners, entrepreneurs and employers in general do not create wealth. Wealth is a capitalist word that is supposed to be a synonym with value. Wealthy people do not create value. We know how value works, but wealth, you know, is the root in wealthy. So, wealth and the wealthy go together. It’s just common sense. Right? Don’t get pulled into a discussion with such shitty use of common sense and language.

When you hear wealth, you should always insist the conversation returns to labor and value. That’s the most important thing. Capitalists do not want to talk about value. Capitalists want to argue that wealthy people create demand. We know that spending creates demand, but again, capitalists will not want to talk about spending. Capitalists will not want to talk about the fact that money in the hands of the poor is much more stimulative than money in the hands of the rich. Why? Well, for example, capitalist libertarians like to believe that 1$ wealthy people spend is worth more than 1$ poor people spend. It’s that simple. It’s an absurd debate to get into. Always insist the conversation turn to labor and value. Bring the conversation from spending, debt, and wealth back to the basic relationship between the employer and employee.

You’ll discover that the capitalists aren’t capable of discussing value and labor because they typically don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t done their homework. They’re simply repeating propaganda.

See also my post from last week. I wrote:

5%, in the US, consume 80% of the capital gains income. That income is taxed at 50% of what it would taxed at if it were normal income. 1% control 40% of that capital gains income. In other words, most US citizens don’t have any access to the wealth their labor produces and a few take advantage of all that labor for their own benefit without having earned it.

When you hear a conservative or libertarian talk about personal responsibility, you’re listening to somebody fighting for the cause of the wealthiest and whitest citizens and against the well-being of the majority of citizens who have no access to it now, nor historically ever have. Personal responsibility really means work that others should do so I can continue to benefit from it and it only applies to privileged individuals who can afford to profit from others’ labor.

If you don’t see the class warfare against the poor, you’re an asshole and an idiot.