On the Meaning of “Middle Class” and the State of the Middle Class

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. Nicholas Partyka

When politicians talk, one of the recurring themes about which they spew platitudes is the economy. It would be the subject of another essay to unpack what is meant by “the economy” when politicians and other capitalist elements use that term. This aside, in discussing the economy there is a phrase that politicians use with such alacrity that it has become trite. This phrase is, “middle class”. Politicians, pundits, and social commentators deploy this term in many contexts, but almost always appealing to its ubiquity of membership, critical role in democracy, and moral virtue in their speeches. These constant references to the middle class in the popular political discourse have rendered this term impenetrably vague. If we listen to politicians then one would be led to believe that most Americans are members of this middle class, whose health and prosperity the politicians never tire of proclaiming as their highest priority. Speeches are one thing, reality another. Let us interrogate this concept of the “middle class”, and see what to make of this notion that plays such a prominent role in American political discourse on the economy.

With an election year looming, and a Presidential election at that, with their seemingly always lengthening election cycle, the phrase “middle class” will only be heard more and more frequently from now until after November 2016. The President’s recent invocation of the phrase “middle class economics” is only the latest salvo between the two dominant capitalist political parties, as they try to position themselves in the public’s mind as the true defender of – the almost apotheosized- middle class. Candidates and their supporters will be arguing more and more vigorously about which party, or which policies, will do more to help this middle class. About the only thing that candidates from both parties will agree on is that the middle class is in trouble, and that economic policies should be designed which maximally promote the welfare of this class. The two major political parties in this country have divergent views about what kinds of policies best aid this alleged middle class. However, both parties are attempting to win votes by claiming to be champions of the middle class, a class with which a great many Americans still continue to identify themselves.

We’re going to explore two distinct, but interrelated questions in what follows. First, we’ll want to know, Who and how many, people are middle class? Second, we’ll want to ask, What does it mean to be middle class? The answers to these questions will likely have to be made relative to particular societies at particular times; though some generalization is possible. To begin we’ll look at what it has meant historically to be middle class. Then we’ll look more in depth into the meaning of being middle class in the contemporary American context. What we will find is a great deal more confusion and ambiguity about this notion of a “middle class”. So much so that we should start to wonder if this notion retains any usefulness.
The Middle Classes, Historically

For most of history being middle class simply meant occupying, however tenuously, a social status that was between that of a slave and that of a noble. Basically, the middle class was composed of everyone who was not technically a chattel slave, and lacking the noble pedigree of a true aristocrat. In most societies of the ancient world this simple definition would indeed make most people middle class. However, this understanding glosses over the highly variegated nature of socio-economic positions possible between technical chattel slavery and blue-blooded nobility. For instance, debt bondage and serfdom, both forms of un-free labour, would not cause one to be dropped from the middle class on this accounting. For example, in the ancient world slaves were often employed as overseers, that is in a management capacity. It would not have been uncommon for slave overseers to sometimes direct the labour of technically free men.

We can see in certain socio-political cleavages that splits have occurred in many contexts between the lower ranks of these middle classes and the higher elements of this class. Middle classes have struggled against entrenched aristocracy and nobility at many points in history for social advancement and political inclusion. However, almost always, in the critical moment, the higher elements of these middle classes would betray the interests of the lower elements, whose bodies, blood and ballots had been used to gain them inclusion. Marx would come to call these “higher elements” of the middle classes petit-bourgeoisie, signifying the much greater material, and indeed much more importantly, aspirational affinity with the bourgeoisie than the proletariat.

Two examples will suffice here. In ancient Greece we see the demos, or “the people” engaging in political struggle for inclusion in the political life of the polis. But who is this demos? First, Greeks used the word demos in two distinct ways. In one sense, we might call the wide sense, it meant the whole citizen body of city-state in general. In the narrow sense, on the other hand, the demos meant the ‘common people’, the ‘lower classes’, the aporoi, the propertyless. This group included a very wide range of socio-economic and political situations, and certainly contained an upper and lower group. The main cleavage within the ranks of the demos is between the better off elements and those struggling to get by. It goes without saying that slaves would not be counted among the demos. Those who are struggling are more, or in worst case entirely, dependent on others for their livelihood. The Greeks called Thetes and Banausoi. The former we might call day-labourers or wage earners, the latter we could translate loosely as artisans. These were the lowest two of Solon’s five social classes, and while not slaves, were subject to various kinds of forced labour. Though some artisans and merchants could be quite wealthy, most were not. Most merchants, as opposed to retailers, though were likely to be foreigners, and thus not eligible for citizenship.

When we focus on the internal political conflicts of the Greek polis of the Classical period (roughly the 5^th and 4^th centuries BC), what we see is a struggle over citizenship, that is over access to political participation in government. While the socio-economic and political realities of the ancient world are complex, in the main the conflicts were between an urban middle class of mainly artisans and middling farmers on the one hand, and the traditional land-owning oligarchy which monopolized political power on the other.[1] The political struggles over demokratia in this period revolved mainly around whether or not the banausoi and thetes should be given citizenship rights. Chiefly important among the rights of citizens were the right to vote in the Assembly, to hold public office, the serve as a juror in the dikasteria, to bring matters before the courts; at Athens in particular, citizens would be entitled to receive a share in any disbursement of the polis‘s dividends from the proceeds of the Laurium silver mines.

The demos was the main agent of social change in the ancient Greek polis, the traditional aristocracy certainly saw it this way. They saw “middle class” elements as being too politically ambitious, which is in part why they deploy the term pejoratively. By “middle class elements” the traditional aristocracy would have lumped together both very wealthy artisans, and much more humble enterprises, all of whom were united in not being aristocrats by blood lineage. Wealthy merchants and artisans might themselves employ slaves both for carrying out production, as well as the overseeing of this work, but they lacked the “best” kind of background. This made them unsuitable for political participation in the eyes of established elites. Smaller artisans and merchants, who didn’t have exorbitant wealth to recommend them, would have been thought only the more unsuited to political life.

All of the main institutions of Classical Greek demokratia were devices designed to help poor and working-class free men defend themselves from the depredations of their richer counterparts. Rule by majority vote in an Assembly, ekklesia, open to all citizens; freedom of speech, parrhesia, in the assembly; large popular courts of law, dikasteria, composed of fellow citizens; rule of law, isonomia, as passed by the Assembly and administered in the courts; the belief that political power should be scrutinized, subject to euthyna, are all practices that helped the aporoi defend their highly precarious social position from the predatory behavior of wealthy citizens. As one eminent scholar describes, “Since the majority of citizens everywhere owned little or no property, the propertied class complained that demokratia was the rule of demos in the narrower sense and in effect the domination of the poor over the rich.”[2]

In the ancient Greek polis political participation was usually restricted to those native adult men who could meet a certain property qualification. In the main, in order to be a citizen one had to possess enough wealth to afford to outfit themselves with the hoplite panopoly. This was the complete set of armaments associated with the heavy armed infantry. If one could afford to buy one’s own armor, and afford the leisure time to learn to fight as part of a phalanx formation, then one was considered worthy to participate in the political life of the polis. The idea being that if one was wealthy enough to afford the hoplite panopoly then one had enough of a stake in the success and survival of the polis to be entitled to a role in the government of the city-state. Those “old money” and nouveau riche aristocrats who were wealthy enough could afford to outfit themselves with horses as well as more ornate armor and weapons, and thus the traditional prestige associated with the cavalry. The question of democracy in the ancient Greek world, was thus a struggle over the inclusion of those who could not afford the traditional citizenship qualification based on the connection of wealth and military service, and who because they were not slaves could make legitimate claims to be entitled to such inclusion.

Renaissance Italy serves as another great example. In the rise of the classic northern Italian city-state podestaral form of communal government there was employed in the popular political discourse a term, the popolo. Loosely translated, it means the people. However, once again we’ll see that this notion of the people actually covers over a major divergence within between well-off members and working-class members. As one scholar claims, “When, therefore, the long and venomous struggle broke out between the popolo (the “people”) and the nobility, the popular movement drew its force and numbers from the middle classes, not from the poor, the day labourers, or the unskilled”.[3]

The political conflict in 13^th century northern Italian city-states was, much like in the ancient Greek world, fundamentally about participation. Beginning in the 12^th century, a political conflict between church and secular authorities saw the rise of communal governments in all the major Renaissance city-states in northern Italy. At the time, this form of government was identified with the self-government of local magnates and aristocrats instead of more alien authorities imposed by church leaders in Rome. In this early phase of commune government, “The nobility dominated the consulate, manipulated the general assembly, and ruled the city, except where the emperor successfully intervened, as at Vicenza, Siena, and Volterra, or where the political power of the Bishop persisted.”[4]

It was against this restricted form of government that the political forces of the popolo were arrayed in the 13^th century. By organizing for combat against the military forces of the nobility, the popolo was able to seize power in the commune and change the structure of commune government, in that it was able to secure more participation for those in its ranks; or more correctly, some of those in its ranks. The popolo, much like the demos, was a class composed of better off artisans, tradesman, merchants, et cetera. It was a class of persons who had to work for a living, that is they had to do physical labour themselves to achieve their subsistence. These people were free, in that they were not slaves or serfs, but were not aristocrats, they did not possess the right kind of lineage. Political participation was at this time still restricted to those who did have the proper kind of aristocratic genealogy.

Much as in the case of the ancient Greek world, the main political cleavage in the Renaissance northern Italian city-state between the popolo and nobilitas largely concerned the way individuals made a living. Nobles owned large landed estates, and derived their wealth and status from being able to control the labour of others, i.e. vassals and serfs. Those who were not aristocrats could be wealthy, could own land, but typically had to work themselves. That is, the typical member of the popolo could not control the labour of others to the same extent that a noble could. The political conflicts of the 13^th century were not simplistic conflicts between land owners and merchants, the reality was much more complicated than that.

Both popolo and nobilitas would be distinguished from a day-labourer in that they would be considered independent in the right sort of way, they would be considered the people who had real freedom. What distinguishes the position of the poorest classes is that they are dependent on others for their livelihood. Thus, for example, the serf is dependent on the lord, the tenant farmer on the land-owner, and the day-labourer on the employer who pays him. These kinds of people would have been considered not really free in the right way, especially politically. Though all God’s children would have been understood to be free, some were not considered free enough to be worthy of inclusion in government.

In what would become an unfortunate recurring tendency, once the leading – i.e. the wealthiest- elements in the “middle class”, the popolo, achieved inclusion in communal government, they allied with the old aristocracy and turned against the lower, more ‘middling’ elements in the popolo to suppress their continued agitations for further liberalization of political participation. Thus, as one scholar puts it,

“Up to about the middle of the thirteenth century, it was in the interest of bankers and -long-distance traders to batter the entrenched communal oligarchy with an eye to loosening the political monopoly of the old consular families, mostly of noble lineage… But after about 1250 or 1260, having fully achieved their aims and in fact now menaced by the political ambitions of the middle classes, they broke with the popolo, thereby dividing and undermining the popular movement”.[5]

With the erosion of nobility and its traditional privileges across Europe and North America from the 17^th century onward, as well as the formal abolition of chattel slavery in these societies, this traditional understanding of middle classes is not sufficient for the world we inhabit. Being neither a slave nor a noble will not help many locate their social position in contemporary societies, when these societies do not formally legally recognize slavery or nobility. As capitalism remade societies across western Europe and North America in this same period, it reshaped the nature of the classes that composed those societies. Thus, a new way to understand what the middle-class is will be needed.
The Idea of the Middle Class in Post-WWII America

There are some who are reluctant to define the middle class using income measurements. The alternative proposed by many of these critics is a more aspirational definition based on consumption. This definition is based on both the level and the kind of consumption desired by individuals who aspire to be middle-class, ie. who desire to live what is deemed a middle-class lifestyle. Most of the essential features of this conception of the middle class are derived from the experience of Americans post WWII. The vast pool of purchasing power accumulated by US citizens during the war led in the post-war period to rising standards of living for a wide swath of the population. The patterns of consumption, the norms and values, of what we today consider definitional of the middle class in America were originated to a large extent in this period.

It was in this period that the idea of the “American Dream”, as it is currently understood, originates. This post-war vision of increasingly wealthy Americans achieving higher material standards of living is the well-spring of many of the elements of middle-class-ness that we take for granted. The conception of middle-class-ness as consisting of things like widespread home ownership, ownership of a motor vehicle or vehicles, stable long-term employment, ability to send children to college, take a family vacation, et cetera, was born during this era.

If we try to understand the middle class this way, we should investigate what the patterns of consumption for a middle-class individual, or family, today requires in terms of income, and how many Americans actually possess the financial means to afford this lifestyle. According to one recent report, it was estimated that a middle-class “American dream” lifestyle would cost $130,000 a year for a family of four.[6] The median income for individual income-earners in the US in 2013 was around $52,000, not even half of that estimated cost. According to a 2010 study by the Commerce Department only a family with two income-earners in the 75th percentile or above could afford the middle-class lifestyle described in the previous report. [7] According to data from a 2014 report by the Congressional Research Service only around 20% of American household could afford this price tag of a “middle-class” lifestyle.

If one takes only the items listed as “essential” in the report cited in the previous paragraph the total cost of a middle-class lifestyle, which is still above the current median income. This accounting clearly leaves out other important expenses, like taxes, that one will incur, as well as makes impossible any expenditure on important items like savings, and recreation. Now, of course food prices change, and fuel prices change, and these effect how wealthy consumers feel, as decreases in food and fuel costs can be transferred to increase consumption of “extras” like college savings for children, or family vacations. One should also note that this report categorized cell phone and internet expenditure as an “extra”. In today’s world these things are properly considered more akin to utilities, they are essentials for living.

Clearly, the level of income needed for achievement of a characteristically middle-class, or “American dream”, lifestyle is out of reach for a great many individuals and families. This is likely part of why the percentage of those identifying themselves as lower-class, or lower-middle class in recent surveys has increased.[8] Indeed, even a family with two income-earners, in the 25th percentile only has an income about equivalent to the median. Meanwhile, as of 2010, an individual income-earner in the 50th percentile only made around $25,000. The rising costs of college, the continued stagnation of wages – especially at the lowest ends of the labour market – as well as the reductions in employer-based pension and benefit programs for most workers have a contributed to making the mid-twentieth century American vision of middle-class existence more and more out of reach for large swaths of Americans.

The post-war American experience, if put in proper context, is the product of a historically unprecedented epoch. According to the research presented by Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the middle part of the twentieth century was the only time in the last 300 years that his law of capital (r>g) was reversed.[9] This was a special period in which the growth rate exceeded the return to capital, and thus workers received increasing wages, and increasing purchasing power. It was in this historically unique period that the main expectations, norms, values, and status symbols of modern American “middle-class” lifestyle were born.

If we look the heyday of the American middle class in the 1950s and 1960s what we see is a transformation of American society born of a historical accident. Piketty’s research demonstrates that income inequality in the US basically plateaued over these decades, after decreasing sharply during the period from 1913-1945, that is the period of the World Wars and the Great Depression. What the French call “les trente glorieuses”, and others have called a pax Americana, was the direct result of the tumult of the wars and economic crises of the first half of the twentieth century. Workers in the western world generally experienced a boom, in that they experienced rising living standards, wages, and benefits. In Europe these benefits often took the form of national programs, while in America they were largely employer-based; healthcare and retirement are good examples. It was in this environment of rising levels of access to material consumption that the dominant aspects of the outlook of the middle class in America took shape.

Without the devastating effects of two world wars and an economic depression of immense scale, governments, especially in the US, would not have made the concessions that they did to workers, to organized labour in particular. The need to secure consistent, reliable production of vital war supplies, which might be disrupted by labour agitation, inclined the US government to enter the fray of industrial warfare on the side of workers during the First World War; at least to the extent required to ensure production for war. The Great Depression was an important cause of the establishment of the main pillars of the American welfare system in the 1930s. Labour unions achieved even greater privileges during the Second World War, as the leadership of organized labour organizations were increasingly co-opted by the corporate interests they were supposed to oppose. As a result of the need to take sometimes drastic measures to fight two wars and a titanic economic depression the US government enacted policies which resulted in a reduction in income inequality. This reduction in inequality combined with rising levels of material consumption, due to workers increased ability to bargain collectively with the support of the legal apparatus of the state, define this unprecedented period in economic history.
Middle Class Confusion

Clarification about the meaning of “middle class” is especially important because Americans seem to be confused about this notion of “middle class”, about who is in it, and what it means to be in it. It is a well-know and, much commented on, phenomenon in American political culture that almost everyone tends to perceive themselves as “middle-class”. What makes this fact interesting, and thus worthy of the decades of commentary and analysis it has received, is the startling economic inequality that coexists with this perception.

Though the rates of self-identification with being middle-class have varied over time, a healthy portion of Americans still identify as being middle class. Even now, after decades of erosion in the position of workers due to stagnating wages, reductions in benefits, cuts to social programs and education, increasing international competition, and the shifting of various kinds of work to the global south and other peripheral economies, as well as more recently the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, 44% of people surveyed in one recent survey self-identified as being middle-class. [10] Indeed this figure has fallen over the years of the Great Recession, self-identification as middle-class fell from 53% in 2008, to 49% in 2012, and then to 44% in 2014. Thus, even in bad times, as a great many people are still struggling, a great many people continue to perceive themselves as middle-class.

There is no one universally accepted way to define the middle-class. Perhaps this is part of the reason why politicians are able to make so much political hay with it. This is also part of how it is possible for a great many rather wealthy see themselves as middle-class at the same time as many of the working poor. It is also part of how many super-wealthy individuals come to perceive others less wealthy than themselves, though still obscenely wealthy, as ‘merely’ middle-class.[11] This lack of a consensus about a definition is certainly one of the reasons there is so much confusion about the middle-class, and who belongs to it, and how one belongs to it.

Conventionally, the middle is understood as everyone in the second, third, and fourth income quintiles. Basically, everyone who is not in the top-fifth or the bottom-fifth of income earners is defined as middle-class. In America today this definition of middle-class is roughly equivalent to those earning between $30,000 and $80,000 a year.[12] This is quite a large middle-class. One might think that it is rather too large. Indeed, how can one assimilate the experiences of an individual, or even more a family, living on $30,000 to one making $80,000? One could, I think quite properly, say that these two sets of experiences are so incommensurable materially as to make them awkward members of a common middle-class. Let us note in this connection that the federal government defines the poverty threshold for a family of four as a bit less than $24,000 a year. So, it would seem hard to think the experiences of family living on about 25% more than the poverty level would be anything like those of a family making more than two and a half times that amount.

That this conception is too wide to be very useful, and for the reasons I alluded to, is admitted by the fact that, at least colloquially, we have adopted the distinctions between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ middle class. This distinction testifies to the difference in material position of individuals, or families, in the upper and lower ends of the middle. The lifestyle, the patterns of consumption, level of access to opportunity, and much else, varies so much between these groups that the distinction suggests itself, and is so patently apparent that no one questions its propriety.

Perhaps then we should narrow our definition of middle-class to only the third income quintile. This understanding of middle-class would include those making roughly $40,000 to $65,000. Even the top end of this range would still be half of what one estimate suggests a middle-class lifestyle would cost. Moreover, only about 15% of income earners would count as middle-class on this way of understanding the middle class. [13] This fact would certainly seem inconsistent with the widespread perception that the middle-class is the numerically largest class. Even if we expand back to our original range of $30-80,000, only about 40% of income earners would be middle-class. While this figure has the virtue of appearing to match up quite closely with the level of self-reported identification as being middle-class, it suffers from the vagueness we noted above. The upper limit of the 4^th income quintile is north of $100,000. I do not think it is a stretch to say the material circumstances of a “middle-class” family making anywhere from the median to the upper limit has much in common with those families earning closer to the lower threshold of “middle class”.

By several ways of trying to understand the middle class we come up with results that fall short of matching our expectations and common perceptions. We seem to end up with either an unhelpfully expansive notion of the middle-class that encompasses individuals and families with greatly divergent material circumstances. Or, one ends up with a more precise statistical conception of the middle class, but wherein fewer persons are understood to be middle-class than commonly report being so in surveys. Part of explaining this confusion about the middle-class is the fact that Americans are either unaware or deeply confused about the nature of the distribution of wealth in this country. Many people report feeling like they are middle-class, but only as a result of ignorance or confusion about the nature of wealth inequality in America. Indeed, it would be crazy to deny that part of one’s perception of class position is the relative position of others. Were more Americans aware of the real nature of the distribution of wealth they would likely feel less middle-class, and more lower-class. According to the results of one recent research study, a representative sample of Americans reported thinking that the share of total income possessed by the middle class in America, i.e. the second through fourth income quintiles, was just north of 40%. Respondents also reported thinking the third income quintile alone possesses over 10% of total national wealth. In fact, the real share possessed by the first through fourth income quintiles combined is less than 20%, and the third quintile alone possesses closer to 5% than greater than the 10% that was reported.[14]

Another important aspect of the explanation for why there is so much confusion about the middle class is the confusion individuals face given their precarious position in the socio-economic hierarchy. Given how much inequality has risen over the last few decades there has been an increase in the perception that the post-war American middle-class lifestyle is out of reach for a great many hard-working people. Rising inequality combined with the effects of a calamitous financial crises, followed by years of recession, caused many to report falling in social class. The youngest cohort especially was hard hit, with now 49% reporting being in the lower or lower-middle class. It also caused many who identify as middle-class to feel this status increasingly precarious. Indeed, according to a Pew Research study from 2014 almost as many Americans reported being lower-class as middle-class, and the spread between the two was a mere 4%.[15]
The Working Class

We have seen now that this notion of the “middle class” is highly problematic. When we attempt a rational accounting of it, what we find is that our social reality confounds many of the expectations that most Americans have when they talk about the middle class. We find that though many Americans report in surveys that they are middle-class, the middle class is small, and shrinking. Once we distinguish upper from lower in the middle class, the true middle is really a small part of the income spectrum. One cannot get too far below the median income for one to be more lower class than middle class, nor can one get too far above without becoming upper-middle, or even elite. For instance, $100,000 in income would put one at the upper limit of the fourth income quintile, while an income at or above $150,000 would place one among the top 10% of income-earners. One cannot thus get too far beyond the $80,000 average income of the fourth income quintile without ending up less middle class than upper class.

If we judge belonging to the middle class as a function of ability to consume, then again we find that the traditional middle-class lifestyle ideal is increasingly out of reach for large swaths of the American population. What we see now is that we need a new way to think about class, about the socio-economic positions that people occupy and how these are best described. Getting a handle on what class one belongs to is important, especially in these election cycles, as appeals for votes are made to members of the various social classes that compose the electorate. How is one to know which kind of candidate or policy to vote for if one does not know what candidates or policies will advance their interests? And how is one to know what will advance one’s interests if one does know have an accurate understanding of their own socio-economic reality?

Rather than muddle on with this vague notion of a middle class, we should substitute a new understanding of class and class relations. This understanding of class should emphasize the role that working conditions play in determining socio-economic position, or class. This understanding will of course have much overlap with the dominant income-based understanding. For indeed, working conditions and wage rates are often highly correlated in market economies, that is, typically the lower the pay the worse the working conditions (in one form or another) and vice versa. When we take the kinds of jobs people work into account, the picture that emerges is one which demonstrates the importance of thinking in terms of a working class rather than a middle class. When we start putting working conditions in the forefront of our conception of social class we gain a much accurate, and explanatory conception of class.

One example that helps demonstrate this need for an understanding of class based on working conditions is the practice of “flex-time”. In the upper end of the labour market this concept is instantiated by programs that allow workers to do their work on their own schedule, freeing workers of the need to always be in the office during the traditional working day. This allows workers to achieve a better work-life balance, by having more flexibility with the time they need to devote to work. On the lower end of the labour market flex-time typically takes the form of on-call forms of scheduling. This is an extension of the logic of the “just-in-time” inventory management systems that have come to dominate manufacturing industries, and applied to the labour force of a variety of businesses, but especially retail firms. The idea, in both cases, is to only have as much as it needed of both on hand at any one time, so as to free up capital from unnecessary investment in extra stock or extra labour.
Conclusion

Have middle classes existed in history, yes. Did a middle class exist in the US during the middle part of the twentieth century, yes. However, in both cases these answers must be qualified, if the nuance of reality is not to be lost. Yet, in appending these qualifications we change the nature of the answers, and thus must come to see the original answer as importantly flawed. In both cases we find the reality of the middle class(es) does not match up with our modern expectations and perceptions about the middle class. In the first case, one might be subject to various forms of un-free labour despite still being technically not a slave, and thus free but by no means rich, or even independent. In the latter case, we find that this ideal of the middle class was quite restricted, and the alleged golden age of its reign was certainly not seen as such by the many marginalized groups of that era. We also see that its very existence occurs because of the confluence of historical circumstances that would be near impossible to re-create.

The idea of being “middle class” is also a source of confusion when compared to modern thinking about the middle class, and its role in society. Indeed, much of the meaning of being “middle class” has always involved poor people, those who work for wages for a living, aping the consumption trends of their ‘social betters’. Thus, even while during the classic 19^th century hay-day of industrialization the middle class, ie. the petit bourgeoisie, was fairly small it nonetheless transmitted its social norms, consumption patterns, taste in art and décor, to those below them on the social ladder. It was not this middling class, but rather the working class, the proletariat, whose consumption, aping the middle class above them, drove the rise of a “middle class society”. This process of transmittal of social norms, values, and patterns of consumption is eloquently detailed by Thorsten Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class.

Today, this notion of the middle class, a remnant of the mid-century post-war Pax Americana, stands in the way of proper thinking about the role of class in society and the role of class in individuals’ lives. We need to be free of this notion if we’re going to able to correctly perceive how class works, and how it has changed. Remember that this notion of the middle class in post-war America was built on stable, long-term employment, with benefits, and pension plans, that paid enough to own a home, buy a car, household appliances, vacations, college educations, and more. In today’s economy these kinds of employment features of increasingly harder to come by for increasingly large segments of the labour market.

What one finds is that as automation increases, and as services increasingly dominate over production, more and more workers are forced into ever more precarious forms of employment. These tenuous relationships serve employers desire for flexibility, ie. ability to (re)move capital quickly, but increase burdens on working class people; especially on their time. Instead of thinking of themselves as “middle class”, these workers should more correctly perceive themselves to be part of what Guy Standing calls the Precariat[16]. The Precariat is already a class in-itself, but the ideology of the middle class in the US prevents it to a great extent from developing into a class for-itself. Opposed to this class is what Standing calls the Salariat, that is, the minority of a firms’ workers who are central to operations. These are core workers who typically earn a salary, have benefits, sick time, vacation days, and many of the other trappings of the fabled American middle class lifestyle.

Politicians will continue to talk in speeches, interviews, and the like about a middle class that supposedly exists in America, and how they will do the most to help it, typically by enacting the policies that will allow it to flourish. From what we have seen here working class people should no longer be duped into thinking that those politicians are addressing them. The rhetoric that dominates our politics simply does not match the reality of the contemporary economy, in particular the labour market. When we adopt a more appropriate view of class we see an economy characterized not by a broad-based and prosperous middle class, but rather by increasing inequality. We see a labour market where trends in job conditions and benefits very much resemble those in real wages. When we adopt a different view of class we see a very different answer to the question, Is there a middle class in America? No, not in a way that matches the mid-century American ideal.

Notes

[1] For a thorough analysis of the political and social conflict in the ancient Greek world see, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. 1981. Cornell University Press, 1998.

[2] De Ste. Croix 1998, 284

[3] Martines, Lauro. Power and Imagination; City-States in Renaissance Italy. 1979. Vintage Books, 1980; 40.

[4] Martines 1980, 29.

[5] Martines 1980, 61

[6] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/07/04/american-dream/11122015/

[7] http://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/documents/migrated/Middle%20Class%20Report.pdf

[8] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/27/despite-recovery-fewer-americans-identify-as-middle-class/

[9] In Piketty’s equation (r) = after tax rate of return to capital, and (g) = the rate of growth of per capita income, a proxy for economic growth. For further information about Piketty’s research see my review of his book for The Hampton Institute.

[10] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/27/despite-recovery-fewer-americans-identify-as-middle-class/

[11] http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/why_so_many_rich_americans_think_theyre_middle_class_partner/

[12] http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2014/04/24/what-it-means-to-be-middle-class-today

[13] http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20811.pdf

[14] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

[15] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/27/despite-recovery-fewer-americans-identify-as-middle-class/

[16] See his book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic; 2011.

Weird Parallels: Helium Waste and 19th-Century Logging

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Kowality Jesus

Source: Disinfo.com

There is plenty of regret to go around about the wholescale waste of the immense virgin forests in pre-20th century America. These forests represented a cheap, high-quality building material to early Americans and a profitable export that only required rudimentary tools and a healthy portion of elbow grease to attain. Unfortunately, the citizens of 19th century America (a few of whom became very rich) did not exhibit the conscientiousness nor collective restraint to prevent from despoiling the vast majority of these invaluable and dignified forests. It simply did not occur to them (until Teddy Roosevelt spearheaded the conservation movement and hippies formed the environmental movement) that this timber resource is exhaustible, and once exhausted practically irreplaceable.

For example, during the early history of my home state of Michigan, it is said that a squirrel could traverse from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan without ever touching the ground. Yet it took an incredibly small amount of time (mostly 1870-1890) for men with hand-drawn felling saws to systematically evacuate every virgin tree on the entire peninsula. The scale and speed of this relentless logging machine still baffles me to this day. In fact, the harvest was so unimaginably great that a profitable industry exists today of recovering the very small percentage of fine old-growth logs that sank during transport and have rested on the bottom of the Great Lakes for 150 years.

Imagine, if you would, that we had saved some portion of these magnificent, centuries-old trees until today. What would a good violin luthier do these days for some now-rare, quality old-growth tone wood? How impressive would Michigan’s tourism industry be if we had thought to save more than just a few monument virgin trees? We can never know.

Yet we find numerous analogs to this 19th-century state-of-mind today. One remarkable example is our prodigious waste of what is a very finite and valuable resource, helium. Helium and its fellow noble gas, argon, both naturally occur on Earth because of radioactive decay (argon as a decay product of potassium-40, helium as an alpha particle from the decay of various radioactive substances inside the earth, mostly thorium). Interestingly, argon composes about 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere whereas helium is only found in trace quantities. This is because helium is SO light that, once released, it actually floats completely out of the atmosphere, which means once it is extracted from its underground home (through a natural gas well) it must be contained or it will literally disappear into outer space during the next solar storm.

But why is helium valuable, you say? Interesting question. As well as being widely used in arc-welding, manufacture of computer chips, and fiber optics, helium finds applications in ultra-low temperature measurements and experiments (since liquid helium is the coldest liquid there is at 4 degrees Kelvin), and is 2nd to none. Liquid helium is used to cool the magnets in MRI scanning, NMR spectroscopy, and a variety of other low-temperature scientific experiments (96 metric tons of it are used in the particle accelerator at CERN, and 120 metric tons were used to launch the Saturn V rocket). In fact, universities and scientific laboratories have large and expensive apparatuses to recycle the copious amounts of helium that is regularly used in scientific experimentation.

The United States actually has a National Helium Reserve based near Amarillo, Texas which was established in 1925 as a source for airships in a time of war. It expanded during the Cold War as a resource for the Space Race and other scientific research (unfortunately we still live in an era of our nation where technological advancements are almost invariably spearheaded by military research). By 1995 the reserve had accumulated not only 450 million tons of helium but also $1.4 billion in debt, so congress decided to offset the liability through completely selling off the helium by 2015 and privatizing the helium production industry. The Strategic Helium Reserve being the only helium reserve in the world, this rather abrupt selling-off had the effect of greatly reducing the price.

As happened in the 19th century when huge forests were being felled as quickly as possible, a glut of supply and a cheap price creates the natural propensity for wanton waste of a product. Even though party balloons are the most visible and frivolous waste of helium, (at some dollar stores one can purchase a balloon WITH helium for $1) they only account for about 8% of overall consumption. The larger users in industry currently have no incentive to purchase helium recycling systems and collect the helium they use, because it is not currently necessary, or profitable, to do so. More fundamentally, with no government organization stockpiling it, natural gas producers here and around the world have no price incentive to capture helium which naturally occurs in some deposits at a concentration of 1-3% and is not difficult to refine. Most natural gas producers currently vent their helium into the atmosphere. According to Nobel laureate Robert Coleman Richardson, in order to reasonably protect the supply of helium for current and future high-tech applications, the price should be 20 times greater than it currently is.

Much like old-growth forests, we will never truly run out of helium because it is constantly being produced by alpha-decay 0f radioactive particles inside the earth, though at an incredibly slow rate. Thus, it will become progressively less and less accessible, and eventually make industrial applications and invaluable scientific research more difficult to execute without enormous funding. So in other words, the 1996 US congress via Public Law 104-273 helped America go from “hero” to “zero” yet once again.

They Live, We Sleep: A Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”—They Live

We’re living in two worlds, you and I.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988), in which two migrant workers discover that the world’s population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them. Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture. A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats. Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.

Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.

In fact, a 2014 study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

Consider this: it is estimated that the 2016 presidential election could cost as much as $5 billion, more than double what was spent getting Obama re-elected in 2012.

Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”

In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”

Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain. As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

By creating the illusion that it preserves democratic traditions, fascism creeps slowly until it consumes the political system. And in times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights, criminalize virtually every form of behavior, and build enough private prisons to house all of us nonviolent criminals.

Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.

Vast sectors of the economy, government and politics are managed by private business concerns, otherwise referred to as “privatization” by various government politicians. Just study modern government policies. “Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized,” writes economic analyst Jeffrey Tucker. “Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect.”

In other words, the government in America today does whatever it wants.

Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime? The answer is the same in every age: fear.

Fear makes people stupid.

Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.

The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.

Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.

We have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.

In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live. Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.

Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.

The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?

Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.

Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.

Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.

If we’re watching, we’re not doing.

The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.

When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”

We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

Neoliberalism Is Changing Our World Without Our Even Noticing

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Wendy Brown charts the ‘stealth revolution’ that’s transforming every aspect of society — and now has democracy in its sights.

By Hans Rollmann

Source: PopMatters

‘Neoliberalism’ is a much confused and maligned term these days. Progressive activists deploy it derisively as a general sort of derogatory label; learned professors write articles on the topic without really saying anything more penetrating. It’s as over-used an idiom as globalization (or as capitalism and socialism were 70 years ago). Even Anti-Flag take up the subject in their 2012 track “The Neoliberal Anthem”: “Strap in and watch the world decay!” they proclaim. Blunt, but not inaccurate.

Yet for all its confounded usages, what exactly does it signify?

In a 2013 review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books that is more useful – if less straightforward – than Anti-Flag, Michael W. Clune described neoliberalism as “an economic doctrine that favors privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government.” (”What Was Neoliberalism?”, 26 February 2013)

But it’s much more than that. Now, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, political theorist Wendy Brown contributes a truly useful text on an over-wrought topic, and one which focuses not only on the economic manifestations of neoliberalism, but on its broader effects on our political and social thinking. “Neoliberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct,’ and a ‘scheme of valuation,’” she writes. It’s a mode of thinking, and the manner in which it emerges can be infinitely varied. We must be alert to neoliberalism’s “inconstancy and plasticity”, she warns, and its ability to reconfigure itself in new guises. Neoliberalism “takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even different idioms. It is globally ubiquitous, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself in space and over time.” It’s a slippery beast, in other words – hard to define and even harder to see when it’s happening.

Brown’s work is an important and vital contribution at this time insofar as it takes aim at the beating heart of neoliberalism: its insinuation in the very institutions and identities which were hitherto used to limit its spread; institutions which, it was once hoped, would sustain deeper and more profound values implicit to democratic society and human sociality.

Brown is less interested than other scholars in the grim economics of neoliberalism: what she focuses on is its implicit threat to democracy. She opens her book by charting the emergence and contestation between ‘homo politicus’ and ‘homo oeconomicus’; between the human who uses politics to shape their world, and the human who is driven by self-interest and sees the world as always already shaped by economics. French philosopher Michel Foucault discussed this dichotomy in his 1978-79 College de France lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics, and Brown analyzes what Foucault saw – and failed to see – about this early emergence of neoliberal rationality.

In a superb if lamentably short section on gender she also discusses the question: “Does homo economicus have a gender? Does human capital? Is there a femina domestica invisibly striating or supplementing these figures…?” Her point is that “liberalism’s old gender problem is intensified by neoliberalism”, or that neoliberalism impacts women with particular vehemence.

Having discussed Foucault’s early charting of neoliberal political rationality, and expanded on his ideas in light of neoliberalism’s trajectory in the past 30 years, Brown analyzes some modern examples of neoliberalism’s diverse expressions. She looks at how it has insinuated itself in governance – in the notion of building consensus, rather than appreciating contestation; in the depoliticization of government; in the valorization of benchmarking and best practices. All of these deliver destructive blows against democratic political will, against the notion that humans can determine their own destiny and ought to shape their own reality. Instead of making their own decisions, governments appoint ‘external consultants’ to tell them what they should be doing; instead of inventing new ideas and ways of doing things, governments survey ‘best practices’ and see what everyone else is doing. It represents, in many ways, the triumph of mediocrity.

Neoliberal rationality infects law and legal reason, as well. Brown offers an in-depth analysis of the Citizens United case, which protected the right of corporations and the wealthy to dominate democratic elections in the US with their overwhelming power of capital. She also offers one of the best and most thorough analyses of how neoliberal rationality is destroying higher education: the post-WWII dream of an educated and equal society has been twisted into an economistic view, which holds that universities exist only to enhance capital; and that the purpose of an education is not to become better able to contribute to the broader political community, but rather to enhance one’s own ability to generate further capital.

Brown’s book is theoretical yet accessible; it’s an important and vital interjection which reveals and casts bare the neoliberal rationality that increasingly governs our world.

Dismantling Neoliberal Rationality

There’s an implicit warning in Brown’s text, which she addresses briefly but is worth some additional reflection. Audre Lorde famously cautioned against using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, and increasingly this is precisely the direction in which efforts to limit the ravages of neoliberal thinking have turned, using economistic arguments in an effort to preserve institutions and principles that are premised on other-than-economistic values. Some examples serve to illustrate this.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, public-private partnerships (P3’s) emerged as a neoliberal strategy transferring control and responsibility for public infrastructure – roads, bridges, hospitals, schools – into private hands. The basic argument held that the private sector, not beholden to political interests but rather to principles of efficiency and maximization of cost and utility, would prove more efficient custodians of public infrastructure. This neoliberal argument piggybacked nicely onto the drive to lower taxes. In an environment where lower taxes resulted in reduced state budgets, maximizing cost and efficiency would ensure public dollars stretched as far as possible.

This argument was received sympathetically by a public which had been worked up (by conservative pundits and politicians) into a collective sense of outrage over personal tax obligations and a sense of diminishing consumer power. It struck an affective chord, even though it was not based on any solid research. Yet P3’s became a dominant and accepted approach to building and maintaining public infrastructure and services.

In the past decade, efforts to fight back against public-private partnerships have achieved some limited success and have taken as their point of departure the fact that these partnerships are in fact not very efficient or effective. The private sector, it turns out, is often even more inefficient and ineffective than the public sector, given that it is driven by values such as greed and profit as opposed to public accountability. Analyses of several P3 projects have revealed massive cost over-runs, invariably subsidized by taxpayers to a cost far in excess of what it would have cost the state to produce the infrastructure on its own. (”The Problem with Public-Private Partnerships”, by Toby Sanger and Corina Crawley, CCPA, 1 April 2009) Contractual stipulations often guarantee corporate profits at public expense, requiring the state to assume all the risk, using public funds to rescue projects when private partners fail or walk away, and in some cases even using public funds to top-up corporate profits that fail to meet agreed-upon projections. (”Ontario Auditor breaks new ground with review of public private partnerships methodology”, by Keith Reynolds, Policy Note, 5 January 2015)

All this is true, and revealing the truly ineffective and inefficient nature of P3s has been critical to turning them back in many cases. However, there’s a problem with this. These campaigns against P3s adopt the same economistic principles as were used to promote the notion of P3s in the first place: namely, that efficiency, cost maximization and capital enhancement ought to be the driving principles of the demos, or public state. The implicit argument is that P3s are wrong not because they transfer public ownership into private hands, but because they do so inefficiently and at the expense of the taxpayer. Granted, there is often a reference to P3s being ‘unaccountable’ to the public, but this is rarely interrogated or explored as deeply as it should be. In fact, it ought to lie at the core of public resistance to P3s. Public-private partnerships are wrong simply because the state ought never to allow public goods to fall under private control, even if it might save more money. Economization ought never to hold sway over the values, principles and political power of the public.

Similarly, neoliberal logic has infected other efforts to fight back against neoliberal initiatives. Labour unions – a common target of neoliberalism—are increasingly defended on the basis that they benefit the economy (through ensuring consistent and safe workplace practices as well as strong wages to bolster consumer spending in the community), rather than on the simpler basis that workers deserve the right to control their working conditions. Efforts to reduce tuition fees for out-of-province/state or international students are often predicated on the notion that their economic contribution to the local economy exceeds the value of their fiscal contribution to the university through tuition fees. Nowhere – or rarely – is the argument presented that post-secondary ought to be a public good and universal right in and of itself.

The danger, in other words, is that efforts to resist neoliberalism are increasingly being expressed in such a way that they serve to entrench and legitimize neoliberal values – economization, efficiency, capital enhancement—rather than questioning or challenging the desirability and social and political consequences of those values in the first place.

Brown acknowledges the urgency of the problem. It’s quite possible, she observes, for neoliberal economic policy to be paused or reversed but for “the deleterious effects of neoliberal reason on democracy” to survive, undermining the potential for substantive, entrenched change. Without tackling neoliberal reason, neoliberal economics and governance will inevitably emerge again. It is the ongoing sense of surrender to the inevitability of economics; of the bottom line; of finance as key determiner of what is politically possible, that dooms the political potential of democracy. Although only emerging at the end of the book, this is one of the key lessons it offers: that efforts to resist or reverse the ravages of neoliberal economics are fatally flawed when “NGOs, nonprofits, schools, neighborhood organizations, and even social movements that understand themselves as opposing neoliberal economic policies may nonetheless be organized by neoliberal rationality.”

Fascism’s Forbidden Face

Brown comes close to a forbidden truth in closing. She notes, with great delicacy and hesitation, the similarities between neoliberal rationality and fascism. “This is not to say that neoliberalism is fascism or that we live in fascist times,” comes the inevitable caveat. But what if it is an emerging form of fascism?

One of the troubling trends that’s emerged in recent decades and needs to be challenged more forcefully is the notion that it’s intellectually taboo, inaccurate or excessive to call something ‘fascist’, or to draw analogies to fascist states like Nazi Germany. An example of this taboo is ‘Godwin’s Law’ – the notion that referring to Hitler (or by extension, fascism broadly) destroys the credibility of your argument. It’s a trendy term, but intellectually dangerous. The fact is, fascism was – and is – very real, and the notion that no one should talk about fascism as seriously emerging in the present day is very much a product of our neoliberal era.

In fact we do need to talk about it. The skepticism with which the term ‘fascism’ is treated; the dismissal of arguments which make reference to Nazis, all collaborate in erasing and masking the very real resemblances that exist between historical fascism and contemporary forms of governance like neoliberalism. In its demand for self-sacrifice to the heartless whole – a demand iterated, for instance, in the sacrifice of millions of homeowners and mortgage defaulters in order to save the banks during the subprime mortgage crisis – neoliberal rationality resembles the demand for citizen self-sacrifice that characterized fascism.

George Orwell (in his remarkable book review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf) warned against underrating the emotional appeal of fascism. While socialism and even capitalism offered a vision of the good life – fewer working-hours, health and education, leisure and pleasure – people appear inevitably lured by the attraction of struggle and self-sacrifice. “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet,” he wrote. The same could easily be said of neoliberalism: people have a remarkable knack of voting for economic tough-guys who promise to make life harder on individuals and communities in order to ‘save the economy’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Brown’s book is essential reading not only for academics but for anyone concerned with our collective political future, and with the defense of democratic politics. Her book ends on a grim note: “Despair” is the title of its final section. Brown has eloquently elucidated the problem, and made a profound contribution to understanding the complex nature of neoliberal rationality and its threat to democracy.

So what is the solution? Brown doesn’t have one, but notes there is no alternative but to keep struggling to find an alternative. We have reached a state of “civilizational despair”, she writes; modernism is dead and with it the hope and belief that we can create a better world. How do we counter this despair, and re-inject hope and alternatives into the world? Such a task “is incalculably difficult, bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success. Yet what, apart from this work, could afford the slightest hope for a just, sustainable, and habitable future?”

Hans Rollmann is a writer and editor based in Eastern Canada. He’s a columnist, writer and opinions editor with the online news magazine TheIndependent.ca as well as editor of Landwash, a journal of literary and creative arts published out of Newfoundland and Labrador. His work has appeared in a range of other publications both print and online, from Briarpatch Magazine to Feral Feminisms. In addition to a background in radio-broadcasting, union organizing and archaeology, he’s currently completing a PhD in Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies in Toronto. He can be reached by email at hansnf@gmail.com or @hansnf on Twitter.

Inside the Belly of the Beast

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Reid Mukai

The Manifold Crises Threatening Higher Education

By Vince Chernak and Henry A. Giroux

Source: Counterpunch

When Western University president Amit Chakma’s jaw-dropping income was posted recently on the Sunshine list, it put a spotlight on the inequities and conflicts that exist in the contemporary university between the administration and faculty, contract instructors and students. The corporatization of the university means the administrators are well off, while those responsible for actual education, doing the teaching, are struggling to survive.

But that may just be the tip of iceberg in this scandal. Prof. Henry Giroux, a renowned and formative thinker in critical pedagogy notes that the role of the university president has diminished into a fundraising machine and is just part of the disturbing decline in the university. “What we need to do is reimagine that the university is a place to think,” he says, “a place for peace, a place that has something to say about critical thought, about educating people to being engaged citizens. I think the public nature of the university is under siege.”

The McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest is the author of over 60 books, including the recent Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, and The Violence of Organized Forgetting. Giroux discusses how we might retake agency in our universities and in the zombie culture at large.

Vince Chernak: Is it fair to say this situation of discord between administration and faculty is not unique to Western?

Henry A. Giroux: No, it’s a trend that’s highlighted both in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also increasingly true in Canada. What we basically see is a business model taking over the universities in which power is being concentrated more and more in the hands of administrators and faculty are basically becoming more powerless. I think the real issue here is as Noam Chomsky points out is what you have is a model in which labour costs are being reduced and what’s being increased at the same time is labour servility. I think this increasing casualization of faculty is horrendous in terms of its implications; not only are faculty powerless, their incomes are increasingly being reduced. Now, that’s not as bad in Canada as it is in the U.S. In the U.S. 70 percent of faculty are either part-time or non-tenure track. That’s horrendous. That basically is about the death of the university in my estimation as a critical institution.

So you have a neo-liberal model at work there and increasingly now under the Conservative government in the U.K. that really is destroying education as a public good. It’s no longer seen as a public good, it’s seen as a training centre for corporate interests.

VC: You’ve said 10 years ago that the university president has become a technocratic fund-raising machine. That wouldn’t have been the case a few decades ago?

HG: If you look at the university presidents of the ’60s and ’70s what you see are a number of people who are well known for producing big ideas. People who wrote books about the university, who saw it as a public good. Or at least were struggling with what it meant to maintain it as a public good in an economy that was increasingly coming into the power of financial interests. But I think what we increasingly see now is presidents being reduced to fund raisers. Of course fund raising is important but what you want to see is presidents who have some sense of vision, that can provide a model of what it means to talk about the university in ways that suggest it’s connected to public life, that address important social problems, that it’s a public good, a public trust. This is not what the Harper administration wants from universities, he wants to turn them basically into car factories. I think you have a lot of university presidents in Canada who are caught in the middle of that, who don’t buy that assessment. Certainly not the president of McMaster University. But at the same time I think the pressures are so overwhelming to instrumentalize the university, to turn it into a business culture and at the same time, produce a faculty that’s practically powerless is an ongoing problem that has to be addressed.

VC: It might be that the vociferous outrage here in London isn’t so much about Chakma bringing in a half-million or a million a year in salary, but that his job mostly entails just such fundraising and that he and the board of governors supporting him are out of touch with the real issues on campus. Before a non-confidence vote Chakma even admitted that. But when government support has been in decline, is that such a bad thing—to hire the guy who’s going to bring in revenues? What are the alternatives?

HG: The faculty have to mobilize, along with the students, like they did in the’60s and take the university back. The university is a site of struggle. I think those people who are most affected, the faculty and students, have got to find ways to link up with social movements outside of the university to be able to educate the public, mobilize, do everything they can to say, ‘Look, sorry, the model that we have now defining the university is a model that is not healthy for democracy, and it’s not healthy for students and faculty. Faculty are more than casual labour, students are more than customers and the university is more than simply a training centre for big business.’

We can’t become like Margaret Thatcher, we can’t fall into the argument that there’s no alternative. What we need to do is reimagine that the university is a place to think, a place for peace, a place that has something to say about critical thought, about educating people to being engaged citizens. I think the public nature of the university is under siege.

VC: Faculty and students are agitating to get the board of governors to see that they have lost sight of the purpose of the university. And while Chakma has said he will work diligently to understand the complaints, he recently declined a meeting with the faculty of Media and Information Studies because the faculty allowed media to observe. He’s in damage control mode and his advisors are clearly trying to protect “the brand.” It looks like administration isn’t just suppressing critical and creative thinking from the faculty, they’re almost at war with faculty.

HG: It’s sad to say that when the administrators shut down any possibility for dialogue, when administrations withdraw into cocoon-like gated communities in which they’re always on the defensive, I think that it’s probably not unreasonable to say that this is not just about an assault, this looks like a war strategy. It looks like power is functioning in such a way as to both stamp out dissent and at the same time concentrate itself in ways in which it’s not held accountable.

HG: You’ve noted the branding extends down to the student body: “the school looks like a mall.” The students are branded, and the curriculum is written by corporations. “Where are the public spaces for young people to learn a discourse that’s not commodified?” you ask. “To think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. There’s no room for the imagination, for creativity.”

VC: That’s an enormously important issue. If the university is going to be a space that takes seriously what it means to educate young people to be critically engaged citizens it can’t construct the university around a set of structures and spaces and organizing principles that seem to suggest the opposite of that — that basically they’re just consumers. The reason that that’s so deadly is that when you instrumentalize and commodify the university like that and you just see students as clients who have to make choices for the marketplace, you’re really talking about the death of a formative culture that is essential for educating people to live in a real democracy. So the issue is not just that branding is becoming an organizing principle of the universities, the real issue is, at what cost? What price is paid for that? What kind of disservice do we do to students? For instance, I was reading today that between 2001 and 2013 the Koch Foundation provided $70 million to 400 campuses — they’re buying faculty, they’re buying courses — in some cases, some of these major corporations have suggested that they’ll give a donation but everyone in the freshman class has to read Atlas Shrugged. What happens when a university is so susceptible that corporate interests step in and decide who is going to be hired, what’s going to be taught? That’s truly the death of the university.

VC: One thing that’s come up under scrutiny through this Western scandal is the prioritizing of STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) faculty funding. I believe German post-secondary education may involve such a split between humanities and the technical or professional streams. Do we have an outmoded idea of the university, one that needs a fundamental restructuring?

HG: I think it’s outmoded, entirely. I’ll give you an example. People often talk about health faculties as simply being instrumentalized faculties, professional faculties that are really bogged down in doing practical things. If you look at health faculties today like at McMaster, they’re involved in community work, public services, interdisciplinary work…so I think that when administrators begin to separate these faculties out in ways in which they say things like, ‘Well, the humanities and liberal arts are concerned about things that are non-instrumental, non-functional, we need to diminish their power in the university… the real work is being done by professionals,’ I think that’s a joke and it’s a misrepresentation. The organizing principles in the liberal arts are so entrenched now in the professional faculties that you can’t separate them anymore. It doesn’t make any sense: nuclear scientists are obviously going to have to take in ethical considerations, right? Professional people don’t work in an ethical void. The liberal arts, people can’t simply live in gated communities and write in languages that nobody can understand. There’s going to be a melding, a bleeding into each other in these faculties in ways in which we say, okay, how do we merge questions of public values and professional skills.

But let me go back to your question. You’re right in the sense that increasingly what we see administrations doing are favouring STEM faculties as an excuse to diminish and eliminate the liberal arts and humanities. I’ll give you one example that is unbelievable. In the States you have a governor that’s instituted a policy in which he said that if you take a course that’s in the field of business, that has a direct application to the business world, we will lower your tuition. If you take courses in the liberal arts then you’re going to pay a higher tuition. Can you believe this?

VC: A lot of kids might be avoiding university these days for more practical trade school or college training that’ll lead to employment. Distinguish the value of education versus training.

HG: When I claim that education is simply a form of training I think that what I’m arguing is that you get people sort of educated to learn very specific skills in ways that completely remove from larger socio- political and economic conditions or questions or disciplines, so that people are learning how to be plumbers but they’re not learning about the nature of work and what it means to have meaningful work in a society. I think that when you place the emphasis on simply a kind of instrumental rationality and you refuse to deal with larger questions, conceptual questions about what it means to be well-rounded educationally and what it means to get a general education and what it means to be able to cross disciplines, what it means to learn how to govern and not simply be governed, I think something terrible happens and that distinction is very important. Education is not simply about an immediate fix, i.e., getting a job. Education is about preparing people for life, it’s about preparing people for the future. And I’ll tell you something else, even the rationale that education is training is not good because often the skills people get in five years, those skills are obsolete. Who wants a doctor who can’t think? I mean we don’t want to turn out Joseph Mengele. You want to have people who have some sense of compassion, who understand the world in terms of power relations, who understand that their work is always enmeshed in political relations and relations of power and never can escape from questions of ethical and social responsibility. When we cut that element of education out, I don’t know what you have. You basically have training schools. I don’t want to create mechanics, I want to create people who can think but also can fix your car.

VC: In his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford notes that much of work today is mere training in following rote procedures, conceived by a systems engineer and perhaps better done by robots than humans. He argues that there can be more human excellence in working with your hands, in practical work that involves actual thinking and coming up with creative solutions.

HG: John Dewey said the same thing, he said in true experience people learn how to think. Multiple things happen when you have to solve problems and you put things together and you apply them to the real world. We do see a lot of that in the university but I think those economic, political and religious fundamentalists who really see the university as a threat… you know, look, the kind of discussion that we’re having in some ways has to have a historical context and I think that what we often forget is that in the ’60s something happened that blew the lid off the conservative mentality. All of a sudden the ’60s were an era of enormous turbulence, people were struggling over the meaning and the purpose of the university, they were arguing for more ethnic and racial representation, they wanted to broaden courses in what was available in terms of academic disciplines in ways that had something to do with the real world, and all of a sudden the university opened up in a way in which all kinds of people were now coming to the university, in the past they were excluded, ethnic groups, religious groups, minorities.

The right never got over this. I mean they never got over this. That’s why you have the Powell Memo of the 1970s saying that the right has to get together and do something about these cultural apparatuses including schools so that we indoctrinate people for capitalism, we don’t let this happen again. I think that much of what we see all over North America and increasingly in Europe is the legacy of that backlash. This is really a counter-revolution. When you talk about doubling up the salaries, all that, I get it, yeah it’s offensive morally and politically but there’s a larger issue here. When you put the context together what’s happening all over North America you have to say two things, you have to say, one, the university as a site for creating the formative cultures that make a democracy possible is a) under siege, that’s for sure. Democracy is dangerous, and the institutions that produce people who engage in it basically are dangerous. Secondly, neoliberalism as we know it is not just about the governing of the market, it’s about the governing of all social life.

VC: Let’s mention zombies for a bit: zombies are back in a big way in the cultural zeitgeist since at least the beginning of the recession in ’09. You referenced them in Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. I think originally George Romero cheekily used this metaphor for the numbed conspicuous consumer in the ‘60s and the age of the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. Tell us how the zombie is recast in your book in contemporary times.

HG: The zombies suggest two or three things. At one level, zombie becomes a metaphor for talking about the way in which life is being sucked out of a society by a financial elite who really represent the walking dead. They really have produced a death-saturated age, and in that sense the zombies, they’re unthinking, they’re unfeeling, they have no sense of the social and I think in that sense they’re reproducing both an enormous amount of misery and violence in the world and also against the planet itself. Secondly I talk about zombies in ways that suggest a kind of sleeplessness, people basically are so tied to simply surviving that in some ways they have no… time has become an utter deprivation rather than a luxury. They’re so focused on just simply staying alive as opposed to the ’50s and the ’60s when people talked about moving up, that they’ve become zombie-like in the kind of political comas that they find themselves in. They lose all sense of agency, at least a kind of agency that would be individual, collective and engaged towards addressing the world in which they live in. I think we don’t even need to use the word ‘zombie’, we can say this is a population marked by horrible precarity. I mean, we see it in students who are so burdened by debt now that their radical imagination has been eliminated. They’ve become zombies in a sense. They’ve become zombies as victims. And I think ‘zombies as victims’ because it becomes very difficult for them to think about anything else than simply paying back this debt and being able to survive. When you live in a world in which survival of the fittest is the only logic available to you, that’s a form of depoliticization.

VC: One could say we’re living in an age of mass psychopathy, madness. From the short-term thinking of governments, self-serving corporations and down to the wretched individual waiting to win the lottery, we seem to be in a very dark place culturally. Is this a terminal state of the human condition?

HG: No, no, no, it’s not terminal. I mean we see all kinds of movements that basically are fighting against this, and let me just say something about that, it’s an important question. I think first of all you can’t sort of universalize power as only a form of despair. Power is also a form of resistance and I think that what we see all over the world right now, we have seen movements fighting against this kind of neoliberal ‘juggernaut’, we see that with Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, we see it with the Black Lives Matter movement, we see it all over the United States. I think young people are waking up. I’m actually more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time. I think the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are now so severe, so unbelievable that nobody’s fooled anymore, it’s difficult to be fooled. You know when you don’t have food, you don’t have health care, you don’t have social provisions, people are chipping away at your life to make your life miserable, eliminating the conditions that would enable some sense of security, then it seems to me the space of politics opens up in a way like we haven’t seen before. Now, it doesn’t offer any guarantees, I mean, people could become Nazis, right? They could be like Golden Dawn in Greece, they could join right-wing movements. But I do think that space is opening up, that the alternative media is opening up, I think that a lot of youth movements are now all of a sudden mobilizing in ways to try addressing the most immediate problems they find themselves in, there’s an environmental movement. But the real issue here is not whether we have resistance. There’s resistance. It’s local, it’s invested, it’s serious, but it’s got to be unified. I think from the Occupy movement to the Quebec student movement, what we’ve seen is that these movements tend to fizzle out quickly. They need focus. There’s no long-term organization. The other side of this is that we don’t talk about power enough. There’s an enormous attempt to sort of talk about leaderless revolutions. I’ll be honest, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what it means to claim that everybody is empowered, that we don’t need organizations to sort of address the issues that we find ourselves in. We’ve got to rethink something about horizontal power, to seize it in ways that suggest that power has to be seized. You have to fight for it. Do you really believe these ruling classes are going to sort of just step down? And that’s not a call for violence; that’s a call for non-violence. That’s a call for street actions, for mobilizations, people developing third parties, trying to imagine political systems outside of the traditional liberal notion of capitalism. Liberalism is dead. It’s dead. It’s simply a center-right movement now. It’s all about accommodation with Obama being the ultimate spectacle of that accommodation. And so the time does exist for reinventing the very meaning of politics and what that might mean.

VC: Do you think the digital revolution we’re going through is aiding that process?

HG: I think it has enormous potential, I really do. I think it has an enormous amount of potential. I think it has to be seized. I mean right now that revolution is in the hands of both the surveillance industry and people who in fact are wedded to privatization, putting everything up on the web, from if you wiped your baby today to when you went to the movies last night. I think that what people have to realize is that that site itself is not about entertainment, it’s not just about happiness, it’s not about instant pleasure, it’s also a site of struggle and that we know the cultural apparatuses that dominate neoliberal societies are really in the hands of financial elites. We need to educate a generation of young people who are not just cultural critics but are also cultural producers. They have to learn these technologies. They have to learn to create their own radio stations, they have to learn how to do alternative media, they have to learn how to open up alternative sites. I look at sites like TruthDig and TruthOut and Counterpunch. These sites are growing like you can’t imagine because there are very few sites that are offering up the kind of alternative languages and modes of understanding that young people really need. They need a new language. The alternative media offers enormous possibilities for that.

VC: You gave a talk at Fanshawe College last year, “A World Beyond Violence in Media.”

HG: What I was trying to say is that we need to really reclaim the radical imagination, we need to rethink the world in terms that don’t simply define it through exchange values, through privatization, commodification, deregulation. We need to invent new modes of solidarity, we need to reclaim public values, public trust, we need to reclaim a sense of the common good and we need to do it globally. We need a new understanding of politics, one that refuses to equate capitalism with democracy. I think that one of the great changes that marks the 21^st century is that power is global and politics is local. The global elite, they’re not indebted to anybody, they don’t believe in political concessions anymore because they float. They’re not tied to nation states, and I think there’s an enormous need to really rethink democracy in global terms and not just simply local terms, that’s not going to work. And I think one of the greatest things we’re beginning to see is, if you look at the movements that are now developing against police brutality, I mean these kids are talking to people in Mexico, they’re talking to youth groups in France. What the internet has opened up is the possibility for creating global alliances and I think that that matters. The real crisis that we face is not simply about the crisis of economics, it’s about the crisis of ideas. The crisis of ideas does not match the crisis of economics. And I think that’s an educational and pedagogical issue. We need to make education central to politics. Central. And I don’t just simply mean that we need to recognize that education takes place outside of the schools, I think it means that we need to build those kind of sites, those kind of cultural apparatuses in which education is crucial in which it mobilizes people, it educates people, and it offers a sense of alternative and a space for agency that we haven’t seen before.

VC: You have a new book, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism. There’s a quote, “There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous.”

HG: t comes from Hannah Arendt. One of the things that Arendt said that I love is, she said at the base of fascism was a kind of thoughtlessness. An inability to think. An inability to understand the world in terms that related different issues, that brought things together. I think what we have to recognize is, thinking is not simply a by-product of actions, it has to inform action, and thinking has to be central to how we talk about a whole range of things from education to a number of public spheres. Thinking is so crucial in that once you eliminate it or you place it under siege or you repress dissent, then what you do is you create the foundation for a kind of authoritarianism in which thinking is seen as dangerous. And I think we’re increasingly seeing that. I think that thinking is dangerous in many places, not only in the most authoritarian states like Iran and others that we can mention but increasingly in the West. When you have a Harper government that wants to censor what scientists are saying about climate change, who are criticizing it and saying it’s man-made, that’s thinking that’s dangerous. You have in the United States the head of the Senate committee on the environment who says that only God can change the environment — believe me, that’s not just an argument for religious fundamentalism, that’s an argument against critical thinking itself.

A Shorter Version of this interview appeared in the London Yodeller.

Vince Chernak writes for the London Yodeller.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

Liberation Is Unprofitable

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

12 examples of how liberation is not profitable and therefore it must be marginalized, outlawed, proscribed or ridiculed.

If we had to summarize the sickness of our economy and society, we could start by noting that liberation is unprofitable, and whatever is not profitable to vested interests is marginalized, outlawed, proscribed or ridiculed. Examples of this abound.

Liberation from digital communication servitude is not profitable. Don’t have a smart phone on 18 hours a day, every day? Loser! Luddite! Liberation from digital communication servitude is not profitable, therefore it is ridiculed.

Liberation from debt is not profitable. Only the wealthy can afford to buy a vehicle without debt, a home without debt or a university education without debt. For everyone else, liberation from debt is not an option, because debt is highly profitable to our financial Overlords and the politicos they buy/own.

This Is How Little It Cost Goldman To Bribe America’s Senators (Zero Hedge)

Liberation from political elites is not profitable. Dependence on the state for monthly payments binds the recipients to the political elites that control the money and payments, and to the financial elites who control the political elites.

Liberation from the staged, soap-opera political drama of elections is not profitable. Election advertising generates staggering profits for media companies, and the ceaseless nurturing of fear, resentment and indignation fuels acceptance of centralized power and control.

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

Liberation from the consumerist mindset is not profitable. Aspirational purchases in the pursuit of appearances are the most profitable of all spending; re-use, repair and informal peer-to-peer sharing are all intrinsically unprofitable.

Narcissistic Consumerism and Self-Destruction (October 20, 2012)

Liberation from the tyranny of central banks is not profitable. Our entire financial system is built on the simple dynamic that everyone is forced to use money issued by the central bank (Federal Reserve) to its member banks and their financier cronies.

Money that is decentralized and not issued by central banks is not profitable.

Common-sense, minimal regulations are not profitable. Regulations feed government fiefdoms and the revolving-door spoils system between the state and private industry, and erect formidable barriers to new competitors. As a result, over-regulation is immensely profitable.

Regulation Run Amok—And How to Fight Back

The ability to think independently is not profitable. The control mechanisms that keep the various classes of serfs in permanent servitude all depend on a dumbed-down populace that has been stripped of the ability to think independently by propaganda, group-think, medications, the education industry and lifelong dependency on the state.

Anti-Intellectualism and the “Dumbing Down” of America

An economy/society without corruption is not profitable. Buying favors, cronyism and cartel control of pricing are the primary sources of corruption. Cartels and the auctioning of favors are highly profitable to politicos and the vested interests who control the tollways of finance, political influence and social mobility.

America’s Main Problem: Corruption

Degrowth is not profitable. Needing fewer, quality things that last for decades is not profitable. Reparing things for nearly-free is not profitable. Giving stuff away to others for free is not profitable. Making do with what you have is not profitable.

Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism and Peak Consumption (May 9, 2013)

A scarcity of stress and anxiety is not profitable. Stress, anxiety and financial insecurity are all highly profitable, as these drive profitably addictive behaviors such as going deep into debt, shopaholic binge buying, multiple anti-anxiety/anti-depression medications, costly therapy and various forms of self-medication.

The Silent Epidemic in a Broken, Deranged System: Stress (April 18, 2013)

Opting out is not profitable. Opting out of debt-serfdom and the burdens of being a tax donkey is not profitable to vested interests or the state. Adopting self-reliance and low-cost/low-impact living and opting out of the status quo culture of consumerism, debt and complicity with a parasitic, exploitive cartel-state Aristocracy/ Plutocracy/ Oligarchy/ Kleptocracy (take your pick–it’s still the same rapacious Elite whatever name you choose)–is not profitable.

Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out (May 17, 2013)

The Mall of American Progress

Posted on May 28, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Scott Beauchamp

Source: The Baffler

Malls may not be an American monopoly, but America’s not really thinkable without them. They’re where we come together, octogenarian mall walkers and teen Goths alike, as we aim for that perfect, elusive balance between over- and under-stimulation. They’re our own controlled-climate variation on the outdoor European arcade; only in the multipurposed American mallspace, you don’t simply exchange money for goods: you exercise, see movies, attend concerts, go to school, and worship God. They’re our culture’s vapid response to the depletion of the commons. And their increasingly empty and abandoned carapaces mottle the American landscape like munition-citadels in the war between consumerism and community.

If the war metaphor seems too dramatic, consider the name of latest big American mall project to announce itself: The Grand Canyon Escalade Project. An “escalade” is a form of military attack that uses ladders to scale a wall. (Though civilian American consumers probably know the word as a synonym for “gargantuan Cadillac SUV.”) And the Grand Canyon is, well, the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon Escalade Project is a proposal to build a mall on the eastern rim of the world’s largest canyon. It’s also a handy metaphor for everything debauched, short-sighted, and self-infatuated about our consumer culture: a belligerent outpost of gaudy merchandise, perched on the very cusp of the void. It doesn’t make much economic sense, it doesn’t make much environmental sense, and it’s an exercise in rapaciousness that represents the worst of American attitudes about unbridled growth.

The Escalade Project has been in the works for some time. The moneymen behind the project call themselves the Confluence Group, LLC, after the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers, where the mall will be built. According to James Joiner’s dispatch on the development in the Daily Beast, the mall will occupy 420 acres “of remote land” and offer a wide array of “retail shops, restaurants, and hotels on the upper rim.” The lowest level of the project would continue to tickle the shopping and appetites of mall visitors, while also offering “stadium seating to take in the views, a museum, visitors center, and elevated river walk.” An IMAX theater will wow moviegoers for whom the splendors of erosion across the millennia may not sufficiently diverting. Meanwhile, the stubborn holdouts who still want to experience the canyon floor beneath their feet will at least be able to do so in the comfort of a people-moving tram. Hiking and donkey-packs are, like nature itself, just a series of needless trials for the single-minded shopper.

The Confluence Group isn’t the only significant regional backer of the Escalade Project. Another key player is the Navajo Nation, which, much to the consternation of some of its members, is promoting the as a claiming it will provide thousands of jobs. Others aren’t so convinced. A group of people opposing the project, calling themselves Save the Confluence, stress that the river confluence is a sacred site to 18 American Indian tribes. Renae Yellowhorse, who has lived on Navajo land her entire life, recently led a New York Times reporter to the precipice of the canyon and surveyed the land below, saying, “This is where the tram would go. This is the heart of our Mother Earth. This is a sacred area. This is going to be true destruction.”

And pace the advocates of commercial development everywhere, at all costs, this doesn’t necessarily promise to be creative (or even merely profitable) destruction. Malls are not guaranteed moneymakers. Crestwood Court Mall, the local mall in my suburban St. Louis hometown, where I would go as a teenager to eat Panda Express and buy discount CD’s as all the music stores slowly closed, is now a “ghost mall,”—a mordant coinage that’s become distressingly common along the American interior. Indeed, the desiccated caverns of Crestwood Court are something of a Grand Canyon unto itself. Crestwood was the first mall to open in the St. Louis area in 1957; now it’s an eerie one million square feet of shopping space, completely devoid of shoppers, stores, and products. It is, fittingly enough, now part of an art project called “Contemporary Ruins.”

The empty, dead mall has become a ubiquitous part of pop culture. Movies like Gone Girl and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie have employed ghost malls as spooky and/or comic backdrops. There’s even a website devoted to the exploration of ghost malls.

And the retail decline evoked in all this ominous imagery is real enough. According to numbers reported by the New York Times, 94 percent of American malls were still economically viable in 2006; today, that rate is down to something just shy of 80 percent. They’re being carved out from the inside, with almost 20 percent of malls being at least 10 percent vacant. The trend continues unabated, in what D.J. Busch, a senior analyst at Green Street, calls a “death spiral.” Filling a million square feet or more of retail space, and keeping it filled, while even more big box stores and malls are built just neighborhoods away is quite a tall order.

Still, boosters of the Escalade Project insist that they enjoy the time-honored commercial advantages conferred by a prime location: it’s on the edge of a national park in the middle of a relatively undeveloped landscape. But in broader environmental terms, that means that things might be even worse if the mall does survive. Saying that it’s going to be “bad for the environment” is a bit like saying that being shot in the head would “impair thinking.” The pressure that the influx of visitors and the population boom of permanent residence would put on the already scant water supply could be catastrophic. The rivers are already strained and dirty from overuse. The group American Rivers recently named the Colorado River, which already serves 35 million people, the most endangered river in the United States. As Bob Irvin, president of American Rivers, recently told the New York Times, “Building this suburban development there would have an impact on the lifeblood of the national park. It’s a threat to the groundwater supply of the Colorado River.”

On top of the project’s all-but certain disastrous impact on the region’s severe water strain and waste issues, there’s also the pending repeal of twenty-year ban on uranium mining near the proposed building site. Where’s J.G. Ballard when you need him?

The Escalade Project embodies and amplifies the worst aspects of the American myth of progress. It’s cheap, of course—and stunningly heedless of the sacred meaning of the site to the region’s original inhabitants. But it’s also disrespectful to our own humanity. The Grand Canyon isn’t just “beautiful” in the sense that a travel brochure or IMAX exhibition might glibly characterize it. It’s sublime, in the way that Edmund Burke famously defined the notion as an otherworldly compound of astonishment and terror. As Burke argued, the full impact of the sublime should overwhelm our minds, and lift us out of the stupor of everyday life: it is, he wrote, “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

As the callow progress of the Escalade Project has made all too clear, we’ve all but lost our ability to recognize, and properly revere, the sublime. Instead, we’ve traded it for food courts, tram-conducted group tours, and emojis. In his introduction to Oakley Hall’s magisterial novel of the myth of the American West, Warlock, Thomas Pynchon observes that “we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot, and drive away; and we need voices . . . to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

Scott Beauchamp is a veteran and writer. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and Deadspin, among other places.

Confronting Industrialism

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Derrick Jensen

Source: Counterpunch.org

Some of the most important questions confronting us are: what should we do about this culture’s industrial wastes, from greenhouse gases to pesticides to ocean microplastics?

Can the capitalists clean up the messes they create? Or is the whole industrial system beyond reform? The answers become clear with a little context.

Let’s start the discussion of context with two riddles that aren’t very funny.

Q: What do you get when a cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun?

A: Two life terms for murder, with earliest release date 2026.

And,

Q: What do you get when you cross a large corporation, two nation states, 40 tons of poison, and at least 8,000 dead human beings?

A: Retirement with full pay and benefits. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide. Bhopal.

The point of these riddles is not merely that when it comes to murder and many other atrocities, different rules apply to the poor than to the rich. And it’s not merely that ‘economic production’ is a get-out-of-jail free card for whatever atrocities the ‘producers’ commit, whether it’s genocide, gynocide, ecocide, slaving, mass murder, mass poisoning, and so on.

Do we even care? We already know they don’t …

The point here is that this culture is clearly not particularly interested in cleaning up its toxic messes. Obviously, or it wouldn’t keep making them. It wouldn’t allow those who make these messes to do so with impunity. It certainly wouldn’t socially reward those who make them.

This may or may not be the appropriate time to mention that this culture has created, for example, 14 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) lethal doses of Plutonium 239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years, which means that in a mere 100,000 years that number will be all the way down to only about 3.5 quadrillion lethal doses: Yay!

And socially reward them it does. I could have used a whole host of examples other than Warren Anderson, who was playing on the back nine long after he should have been hanging by the neck (he was sentenced to death in absentia, but the US refused to extradite him).

There’s Tony Hayward, who oversaw BP’s devastation of the Gulf of Mexico and who was ‘punished’ for this with a severance package worth well over $30 million. Or we could throw another couple of riddles at you, which are really the same riddles:

Q: What do you call someone who puts poison in the subways of Tokyo?

A: A terrorist.

Q: What do you call someone who puts poison (cyanide) into groundwater?

A: A capitalist: CEO of a gold mining corporation.

We could talk about frackers, who make money as they poison groundwater. We could talk about anyone associated with Monsanto. You can add your own examples. I’d say you can ‘choose your poison’ but of course you can’t. Those are chosen for you by those doing the poisoning.

Civilization’s ability to overcome our native common sense

I keep thinking about one of the most fundamentally sound (and fundamentally disregarded) statements I’ve ever read. After Bhopal, one of the doctors trying to help survivors stated that corporations (and by extension, all organizations and individuals) “shouldn’t be permitted to make poison for which there is no antidote.”

Please note, by the way, that far from having antidotes, nine out of ten chemicals used in pesticides in the US haven’t even been thoroughly tested for (human) toxicity.

Isn’t that something we were all supposed to learn by the time we were three? Isn’t it one of the first lessons our parents are supposed to teach us? Don’t make a mess you can’t clean up!

Yet that is precisely the foundational motivator of this culture. Sure, we can use fancy phrases to describe the processes of creating messes we have no intention of cleaning up, and in many cases cannot clean up.

And so we get phrases like ‘developing natural resources’, or ‘sustainable development’, or ‘technological progress’ (like the invention and production of plastics, the bathing of the world in endocrine disruptors, and so on), or ‘mining’, or ‘agriculture’, or ‘the Green Revolution’, or ‘fueling growth’, or ‘creating jobs’, or ‘building empire’, or ‘global trade’.

But physical reality is always more important than what we call it or how we rationalize it. And the truth is that this culture has been based from the beginning to the present on privatizing benefits and externalizing costs. In other words, on exploiting others and leaving messes behind.

Hell, they call them ‘limited liability corporations’ because a primary purpose is to limit the legal and financial liability of those who benefit from the actions of corporations for the harm these actions cause.

Internalizing insanity

This is no way to run a childhood, and it’s an even worse way to run a culture. It’s killing the planet. Part of the problem is that most of us are insane, having been made so by this culture. We should never forget what RD Laing wrote about this insanity:

“In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex [and I would say this entire way of life, including the creation of messes we have neither the interest nor capacity to clean up], we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity.

“We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high IQs, if possible.”

We’ve all seen this too many times. If you ask any reasonably intelligent seven-year-old how to stop global warming caused in great measure by the burning of oil and gas and by the destruction of forests and prairies and wetlands, this child might well say, “Stop burning oil and gas, and stop destroying forests and prairies and wetlands!”

If you ask a reasonably intelligent thirty-year-old who works for a ‘green’ high tech industry, you’ll probably get an answer that primarily helps the industry that pays his or her salary.

Part of the brainwashing process of turning us into imbeciles consists of getting us to identify more closely with-and care more about the fate of-this culture rather than the real physical world. We are taught that the economy is the ‘real world’, and the real world is merely a place from which to steal and on which to dump externalities.

Does nature have to adapt to us? Or us to nature?

Most of us internalize this lesson so completely that it becomes entirely transparent to us. Even most environmentalists internalize this. What do most mainstream solutions to global warming have in common? They all take industrialism as a given, and the natural world as having to conform to industrialism.

They all take empire as a given. They all take overshoot as a given. All of this is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. The real world must always be more important than our social system, in part because without a real world you can’t have any social system whatsoever. It’s embarrassing to have to write this.

Upton Sinclair famously said that it’s hard to make a man understand something, when his job depends on him not understanding it.

I would add that it’s hard to make people understand something when the benefits they accrue through their exploitative and destructive way of life depend on it. So we suddenly get really stupid about the waste products produced by this culture.

When people ask how we can stop polluting the oceans with plastic, they don’t really mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic?” They mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic and still have this way of life?”

And when they ask how we can stop global warming, they really mean, “How can we stop global warming without stopping this level of energy usage?”. When they ask how we can have clean groundwater, they really mean, “How can we have clean groundwater while we continue to use and spread all over the environment thousands of useful but toxic chemicals that end up in groundwater?”

The answer to all of these is: you can’t.

First we must recover our sanity. Then we must act

As I’ve been writing this essay about the messes caused by this culture, there’s an allegorical image I can’t get out of my mind. It’s of a half-dozen Emergency Medical Technicians putting bandages on a person who has been assaulted by a knife-wielding psychopath.

The EMTs are trying desperately to stop this person from bleeding out. It’s all very tense and suspenseful as to whether they’ll be able to staunch the flow of blood before the person dies.

But here’s the problem: as these EMTs are applying bandages as fast as they can, the psychopath is continuing to stab the victim. Worse, the psychopath is making wounds faster than the EMTs are able to bandage them. And the psychopath is paid very well for stabbing the victim, while most of the EMTs are bandaging in their spare time.

And in fact the health of the economy is based on how much blood the victim loses – as in this culture, where economic production is measured by the conversion of living landbase into raw materials, e.g., living forests into two-by-fours, living mountains into coal.

How do we stop the victim from bleeding out? Any child can tell you. And any sane person who cares more about the health of the victim than the health of the economy that is based on dismembering the victim can tell you. The first thing you need to do is stop the stabbing. No amount of bandages will make up for an assault that is ongoing, indeed, one that is accelerating.

What do we do about this culture’s fabrication of industrial wastes? The first step is stop their production. Actually the first step is that we regain our sanity, that is, we transfer our loyalty away from the psychopaths, and toward the victim, toward, in this case, the planet that is our only home.

Once we do that, everything else is technical. How do we stop them? We stop them.

Derrick Jensen is Member of the Steering Committee of Deep Green Resistance. See more details. Read Derrick Jensen’s blog.

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