Counterculture: The Rebel Commodity

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By James Curcio

Let’s talk about being a rebel.

Everyone seems to want to be one. But it’s not entirely clear what it means. Does it take camo- pants? A Che T-shirt? A guitar? Is it just doing the opposite of whatever your parents did? “Be an individual, a rebel, innovate,” so many advertisements whisper. They’d have us believe that True Revolutionaries think different. They use Apple, or drink Coke. We signal our dissent to one another with the music we listen to and the cars we drive.

There’s something very peculiar going on here, something elusive and deeply contentious.

In the 1997 book, Commodify Your Dissent, Thomas Frank laid out a thesis that may appear common sense to those that have watched or lived in the commodified subcultures of the 90s, 00s, and beyond. A New York Times review comments,

… business culture and the counterculture today are essentially one and the same thing. Corporations cleverly employ the slogans and imagery of rebellion to market their products, thereby (a) seizing a language that ever connotes “new” and “different,” two key words in marketing, and (b) coaxing the young effortlessly into the capitalist order, where they will be so content with the stylishly packaged and annually updated goods signifying nonconformity they’ll never so much as consider real dissent — dissent against what Frank sees as the concentrated economic power of the “Culture Trust,” those telecommunications and entertainment giants who, he believes, “fabricate the materials with which the world thinks.” To have suffered the calculated pseudo-transgressions of Madonna or Calvin Klein, to have winced at the Nike commercial in which the Beatles’ “Revolution” serves as a jingle, is to sense Frank is on to something. (After reading Frank, in fact, you’ll have a hard time using words like “revolution” or “rebel” ever again, at least without quotation marks.)

The urge to rebel fuels the same system they ostensibly oppose. Whether it’s in arms trade, or far less ominously, manners of dress and behavior, there are dollars to be made fighting “The Man.” And maybe making money isn’t always an altogether bad thing. But it is certainly a complication, especially for those espousing neo-Marxists ideals.

As Guy Debord observed, “revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology and knows it.” Rebel movements are a counterculture, regardless of what they call themselves.

Rebellion is Cool

We’ll begin with a quintessential icon of the branded, shiny counterculture. The Matrix. We’ve probably all seen it. Even as an example it’s a cliché, and that’s part of the point. Here’s a framed sketch of the first movie, for those that haven’t: when it first ran, it was a slick take on the alienation most suburban American youth feel, packaged within the context of the epistemological skepticism Descartes wrestled with in the 17th century. Taken out of the cubicle and into the underworld, we witness the protagonist “keeping it real” by eating mush, donning co-opted fetish fashion, and fighting an army of identical men in business suits in slow motion. The movie superimposes the oligarchic and imperialist powers-that-be atop Neo’s quest of adolescent self-mastery. A successful piece of marketing — you can be sure no one collecting profits or licensing deals let their misgivings about “the Man” keep them from paying the rent.

This is not to point an accusatory finger, but rather to show the essential dependence of the counterculture upon the mainstream, because counter-cultures are not self-sustaining, and every culture produces a counter-culture in its shadow, just as every self produces an other. Any counterculture. Punk, mod, beatnik, romantic, hippy, psychedelic, straight edge, or occult. Even the early adopters of Internet culture started a group of outsiders that shared a collective vision,

The computer enthusiasts who could only dream of an open, global network in 1990 would go on to staff the dot-coms of the next decade. The closed networks that once guarded forbidden knowledge quickly fell by the wayside, and curiosity about computers could no longer be imagined a crime.

Our cyberspace today has its share of problems, but it is no dystopia — and for that, we must acknowledge the key part played by the messy collision of table-top games, computer hacking, law enforcement overreach and cyberpunk science fiction in 1990.

This article explores the strange history of Peter Jackson games, TSR, and the FBI. But it wasn’t the only one. Shadow Run, another popular cyberpunk RPGs of the 1990s, presented one of the more seemingly-improbable of cyberpunk futures, where you could play a freelancing mutant scrambling to survive in an ecosystem of headless corporations connected through cyberspace. Sound familiar? The Matrix just represented the final translation of these and similar fringe narratives into the mainstream.

Future vision has some effect on future reality, both in the identities we imagine for ourselves and the technologies we choose to explore. They almost always have unexpected consequences. Now we carry the networked planet in our palms, granting near instant communication with anyone, anywhere and anytime, and your intended subject isn’t always the only one listening.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this feedback loop. Without laying the material, mythic, and social groundwork for a new society, counterculture cannot be a bridge; it almost invariably leads back to the mainstream, though not necessarily without first making its mark and pushing some new envelope.

This even presents something of a false dichotomy — that old models of business can’t themselves be co-opted by countercultural myths. Yesterday’s counterculture is today’s mainstream. What better way to understand the so-called revolution of iPads or social media?

Our cultural symbols and signifiers are never static. Psychedelic and straight edge can share the same rack in a store if the store owner can co-brand the fashions, and people can brand themselves “green” through their purchasing power without ever leaving those boxes or worrying about the big picture. AdBuster’s Buy Nothing Day still capitalizes on the “rebel dollar.”

Rebellion is cool. “Cool” is what customers pay a premium for, along with the comfort of a world with easy definitions and pre-packaged cultural rebellions. This process itself isn’t new. The rebel or nonconformist is probably a constitutive feature of the American imagination: original colonies were religious non-conformist, the country was founded by rebellion, the frontier, the civil war, the swinging 20s, Jazz, James Dean, John Wayne, Elvis, the list goes on. The non-conformist imagination is as paradoxically and problematically American as cowboys and indians, apple pie and racism.

The territory between aesthetic, ideals, and social movement is blurry at best. But the most well-known expression of this trend in recent history is the now somewhat idealized 1960s, a clear view of which has been obscured through a haze of pot-smoke and partisan politics. Though this revolution certainly didn’t start in the 1960s, there we have one of the clearest instances of what good bed-fellows mass advertising and manufacturing make when branded under the zeitgeist of the counterculture.

When people bought those hip clothes to make a statement, whose pockets were they lining? It’s a revolving door of product tie-ins, and it all feeds on the needs of the individual, embodied in a sub-culture. The moment that psychedelic culture gained a certain momentum, Madison Avenue chewed it up and spit it back out in 7up ads. That interpretation of what it meant to be a hippie, a revolutionary, became an influence on the next generation. The rise of Rolling Stone magazine could also be seen as an example of this — a counterculture upstart turned mainstream institution.

While advertising and counterculture get along just fine, authenticity and profit often make strange bedfellows. But they aren’t necessarily diametric opposites, either. As movements gain momentum, they present a market, and markets are essentially agnostic when it comes to ideals.

There are many examples of how troubled that relationship can be. The Grunge movement in the 90s, before it was discovered, was just a bunch of poor ass kids playing broken ass instruments in the Pacific Northwest. This was the very reason it struck disenfranchised youth — the relationship between those acts and the aging record industry in many ways seemed to reflect the relationship of adolescent Gen Xers with their Boomer parents. They retained the desire to “drop out,” as Timothy Leary had preached to the previous counterculture generation of Laguna Beach and Haight Ashbury, but without the mystical optimism of “tuning in.” Hunter S Thompson maybe presaged this transition in the quotation from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas that’s now rendered famous to the kids of 90s thanks to Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation,

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60’s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously… All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody… or at least some force – is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

I don’t think it’s a great stretch to imagine the suddenly-famous bands of the Grunge era as a part of this same legacy. Alice In Chains or Nirvana songs about dying drugged out and alone weren’t oracular prophecy, they were journal entry. And it became part of the allure, because it too was “authentic.” The greatest irony of all was that the tragic meltdowns and burn outs that followed on fame’s heels became part of the commodity. (Not that this vulture economy is new to tabloids).

Our narratives about authentic moments of aesthetic expression or innovation often depict them like volcanic eruptions: they build up and acquire force in subterranean and occluded environments, before erupting in a momentary and spectacular public display of creativity. It is telling that this quote from On The Road has become so popular, very likely cited in the papers and journals of more rebellion-minded American teens than any other from that book, “… The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain… the 27 Club is big. And quite a few more could be added if it was “the 20-something club.” Are the public self destructions of so many young, creative minds informed by this myth, or do they create it?

Maybe a bit of both. The Spectacle, in the sense Guy Debord uses it, disseminates its sensibilities, styles — a version of the truth. The particular moves ever toward the general, as facts gradually turn to legend and, eventually, myth. Mainstream appropriation is the process in which aesthetic movements affect broader society and culture. The ideals need a pulpit to reach the people, even if invariably it is fitted with guillotines for the early adopters once that message has been heard.

YOUR FATASS DIRTY DOLLAR

A message is a commodity, or it is obscure. Capitalism survives so well, in part, because it adapts to any message. If we instead think counterculture is an ideal that exists somehow apart from plebeian needs like making money, then countercultures will forever hobble itself. It doesn’t matter that these ideologies have little in common. It is the fashion or mystique that gets sold. Anti-corporate ideology sells as well as pro-. When all an ideology really boils down to is an easy to replicate aesthetic, how could they not?

Where do we draw the line between idealism and profit? The question is how individuals utilize or leverage the potential energy represented by that currency, and what ends it is applied to. Hard nosed books on business by the old guard, such as Drucker’s Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices say exactly the same thing, in a less epigrammatic, Yoda-like way: profit is not a motive, it is a means. This much, at least, doesn’t change with the changing of the (sub)cultural tides. Within our present economic paradigm, without profit, nothing happens. Game over.

Those who position themselves as extreme radicals within the counterculture framework just disenfranchise themselves through an act of inept transference, finding anything with a dollar sign on it questionable. To this view, anyone that’s made a red cent off of their work is somehow morally bankrupt. This mentality generally ends one way: howling after the piece of meat on the end of someone else’s string, working by day for a major corporation, covering their self-loathing at night in tattoos, and body-modifications they can hide. That is, unless they lock themselves in a cave or try to start an agrarian commune. None of this posturing is in any way necessary, since business rhetoric itself has long since co-opted the countercultural message. For instance, this passage from Commodify your Dissent,

Dropping Naked Lunch and picking up Thriving on Chaos, the groundbreaking 1987 management text by Tom Peters, the most popular business writer of the past decade, one finds more philosophical similarities than one would expect from two manifestos of, respectively, dissident culture and business culture. If anything, Peters’ celebration of disorder is, by virtue of its hard statistics, bleaker and more nightmarish than Burroughs’. For this popular lecturer on such once-blithe topics as competitiveness and pop psychology there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is certain. His world is one in which the corporate wisdom of the past is meaningless, established customs are ridiculous, and “rules” are some sort of curse, a remnant of the foolish fifties that exist to be defied, not obeyed. We live in what Peters calls “A World Turned Upside Down,” in which whirl is king and, in order to survive, businesses must eventually embrace Peters’ universal solution: “Revolution!”

“To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene,” he counsels, “we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.” He advises businessmen to become Robespierres of routine, to demand of their underlings, “‘What have you changed lately?’ ‘How fast are you changing?’ and ‘Are you pursuing bold enough change goals?’” “Revolution,” of course, means for Peters the same thing it did to Burroughs and Ginsberg, Presley and the Stones in their heyday: breaking rules, pissing off the suits, shocking the bean-counters: “Actively and publicly hail defiance of the rules, many of which you doubtless labored mightily to construct in the first place.”

Growth on its own is never a clear indicator that the underlying ideals of a movement will remain preserved. If history has shown anything, it is that successful movements spread until core message becomes an empty, parroted aesthetic, as with most musical scenes and their transition from content to fashion; or that core is otherwise so emphasized that the meaning within is lost through literalism, as we can see in the history of the world’s major religions. One version of early Christian Gnostic history — of “love thy neighbor,” “all is one,” and scurrilous rumors of agape orgies — were replaced by the Roman Orthodoxy and the authority provided through the ultimate union of State and Religion. The hippies traded in their sandals and beat up VWs for SUVs and overpriced Birkenstocks. The relationship between ideology and act is far to complicated to enter into here, but the counter-history of Communism when viewed against the backdrop of Marxist ideals is perhaps equally insightful.

Enantiodromia, the tendency of things to turn into their opposites, is as much social observation as psychological. It oftentimes seems that succeeding too well can be the greatest curse to befall a movement. When the pendulum swings far in one direction, it often turns into its opposite without having the common decency to wait to swing back the other way.

As we’ve seen, this was part of the supposed downfall of counterculture in capitalism: “suits” decided they could deconstruct an organic process and manufacture it. They could own it from the ground up.

But this isn’t necessarily so. The branding of Cirque Du Soleil points toward a third option — arts movements will be dissected in the jargon of marketing, and they must succeed on those grounds to be taken seriously or accomplish anything.

Burning Man isn’t suddenly opening its gates to the wealthy. Yacht Communism has been a part of that movement ever since it gained some mainstream appeal, likely before. Seen as an arts and cultural movement, it has been vastly successful. Seen as an example of how to create a true egalitarian society, it would be an utter failure. But that was never the point.

Two weeks at Burning Man might be fun, even transformative, but spend two years there and you’d find out what hell is like.

Neoliberalism, Austerity, and Authoritarianism

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Riad Azar

Source: New Politics

Ask anyone what neoliberalism means and they’ll tell you it’s an economic system that corresponds to a particular economic philosophy. But any real-world economic system has a corresponding political system to promote and sustain it. Milton Friedman, who has become known as the father of neoliberal thinking, claims in his text Capitalism and Freedom that “the role of the government … is t o do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game.”* While neoliberalism’s advocates like to claim that the political system that corresponds to their economic preference is a democratic, minimal state, in practice, the neoliberal state has demonstrated quite the opposite tendency.

This essay will begin by sketching out the core tenets of neoliberal theory, tracing its history from the classical liberal tradition of the Enlightenment. I will then present some hypotheses on how relations between the neoliberal state and society operate, contrasting the state theories of Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas to create a framework that shows how the neoliberal state is a product and enforcer of anti-democratic practices. I will argue that the implementation of neoliberal economic policy, and the subsequent evolution of the neoliberal state, has historically been completed through anti-democratic methods. Further, in an effort to produce social relations that are more favorable to the accumulation of capital, austerity is employed as a tool to move further toward a market society, creating a larger, more interventionist state and promoting authoritarianism.

Neoliberalism in Theory

The term neoliberal is often convoluted, confused, and misinterpreted, especially in the American context where the center-left Democratic Party has traditionally held the title of liberal. The original liberals, or classical liberals as they are usually called, were those Enlightenment-era thinkers of Western European origin who desired to limit the authority of the feudal state and defended individual rights by restricting the power of the state, the crown, the nobility, and the church. The “neo” prefix serves as a romantic symbol, an attempt at establishing a (sometimes forced) common ground with historical figures like Adam Smith and the classical liberals, who challenged the tendencies of the monarchy to interfere in the economy for its own gain, producing inefficiency. Neoliberal economic thinkers are famously known for deriding government intervention in the economy, precisely because they trace their foundation to a period when markets were seen not just as a source of better economic outcomes, but as a weapon to challenge concentrated political power.

This revamping of liberalism appeared in the twentieth century at a time when its proponents believed they were facing a similar struggle against the expanded state apparatuses of Europe—communist, social-democratic, and fascist. Friedrich Hayek, whose text The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, is arguably the most celebrated of the neoliberal canon, sought to show how government interference in the economy forms the basis of fascist and other totalitarian regimes, contrary to the then widely accepted notion that it was capitalist crisis that had produced fascism in Europe. For Hayek, the strong state, whether in the form of fascism, Soviet communism, or the creeping socialism of the British Labour Party, was to be eschewed.

If neoliberalism springs from a desire to combat the growing power and influence of the state, how is it that neoliberalism has produced not only a very robust state apparatus, but, as I will argue, an authoritarian one? The answer is that neoliberalism in practice has been quite different from its theory.

The Necessities of the State
in Neoliberal Theory

As David Harvey points out in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the neoliberals’ economic ideals suffer from inevitable contradictions that require a state structure to regulate them. The first of these contradictions revolves around the role of law to ensure the individual’s superiority over the collective in the form of private ownership rights and intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights). A judicial system is necessary to designate and regulate the interaction between private actors on the market. While intimations of the regulatory state can be seen in this formulation, it is hardly anything controversial. Only the most extreme of laissez-faire economic thinkers would not acknowledge the requirement of a state structure that creates the space for and regulates contracts.

The second contradiction derives from the elites’ historical ambivalence regarding democracy and mass participation. If the people were free to make decisions about their lives democratically, surely the first thing they would do is interfere with the property rights of the elite, posing an existential threat to the neoliberal experiment. Whether these popular aspirations take the form of drives towards unionization, progressive taxation, or pushing for social policies that require the redistribution of resources, the minimal state cannot be so minimal that it is unable to respond to and crush the democratic demands of citizens. After all, as pointed out in the first contradiction, the neoliberal state exists in theory to guarantee the rights of the individual over the demands of a majority. Therefore, a system must be put in place that protects against the “wrong” decisions of a public that is supposed to buy, sell, act, and choose freely.

Two Levels of Authoritarianism

Any method that seeks to subvert the democratic demands of citizens, whether through force, coercion, or social engineering, is authoritarian. I argue here that the neoliberal state is authoritarian in two distinct but related forms. First, the historical imposition of neoliberalism on nation-states is the result of anti-democratic forces. Second, the maintenance of neoliberalism requires a market society achieved through a transformation in civil society. For this transformation to take place, welfare states must be slimmed down by austerity policies in order to turn over to the market potentially lucrative sectors of the social economy (in health care, education, social security, and so on). Public resources must become privatized; the public good must be produced by private initiative. Neoliberal economic policy can only function with a state that encourages its growth by actively shaping society in its own image, and austerity is the tool to push for that transformation. While the subversion of democracy is clearly authoritarian, the drive towards a market society and the social engineering necessary to maintain that society are further expressions of the de facto authoritarianism of neoliberalism and the neoliberal state.

Austerity traditionally has been defined as the economic policies surrounding deficit cutting. When public debt runs too high, according to the theory, the accounts must be balanced by cutting spending and raising taxes. It is important to look past the theory to see the results of austerity in practice and understand austerity as a social-historical force. To do this, one must define austerity from the perspective of its victims. Pablo Iglesias, leader of the Podemos party in Spain, in his February 17 appearance on the Democracy Now! show, did just that by arguing that austerity is when people are forced out of their homes, when social services do not work, when public schools lack resources, when countries do not have sovereignty and become the colonies of financial powers. He closes by saying that austerity is the end of democracy, because without democratic control of the economy, there is no democracy.

The State and Society

The nature of how the state affects society has been a contentious topic within left traditions. Most notably, the debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas that took place in the pages of the New Left Review in the early 1970s refreshed the study of the state. Miliband, in his The State in Capitalist Society, stressed an instrumentalist position, arguing that the reproduction of capitalism in society is due to the socialization of the ruling class in the tradition of capitalist dogma. As a large proportion of those who dominate the state and control its levers come from an elite education (he was writing from the perspective of British politics in the mid-twentieth century), it’s no surprise that they believe their theories to be correct and just, while the state they run serves the interests of capital. The writings of Poulantzas, in particular Political Power and Social Classes, argued a structuralist position strongly influenced by the thought of Louis Althusser. He claimed that the relation between the ruling class and the state was an objective relation, meaning that the coincidence of bourgeois ideology with the ideology of the state was a matter of how the system itself is organized. Their two state theories, the former arguing that the state is an instrument of the ruling class and the latter arguing that the state is the objective result of the capitalist system, shed light on the differences in conceptualizing not only the capitalist state, but how the state relates to and is legitimized by society. Is the market society a result of policies implemented by individuals in power who are trained in a particular neoliberal tradition, or an objective outcome of capitalist social relations that are the superstructural product of a system?

What could arguably be the genius of neoliberalism is the way in which it takes these two approaches to state theory and blends them. On the one hand, for Miliband, the neoliberal state is the extension of ruling-class free-market ideology, propagated by government bureaucrats, military officials, and technocrats who can speak no other language than that of the privileged status of capital and who hold the belief that they are serving the greater good. On the other hand, as Poulantzas suggested, neoliberalism needs to ensure its own survival by bending civil society, political institutions, and democracy to its will.

A state that so blatantly puts the rights and needs of one small class of citizens over others cannot be installed without a struggle. And further analysis shows us that once neoliberal regimes come into power, a certain degree of social engineering and coercion are necessary in order to guarantee the submission of the population and ensure the smooth accumulation of capital. In what follows, I would like to lay out how neoliberal austerity regimes were installed, and also draw on hypotheses of how they are maintained. However, as each socio-political system is unique in its history, culture, norms, and traditions, the manifestation and maintenance of the neoliberal state differs depending on whether we are talking about core countries or peripheral ones, to use the terminology of World Systems Theory. The common denominator is the empowering of elites over the masses with the assistance of international forces through military action or financial coercion—a globalized dialectic of ruling classes.

Peripheral Neoliberal States

In the periphery, those countries that have been dominated by colonial and neocolonial developed countries, economic and political trends beginning in the 1970s show that neoliberalism has been installed by the use of force. The Latin American experience demonstrates how neoliberalism was established through military operations and coups d’état. In Chile, the democratically elected president Salvador Allende was overthrown and the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet proceeded to crush labor unions and popular movements, privatizing a chunk of the public sector. When Pinochet stepped down, initiating a transition to democracy, he left behind the constitution that he had signed and put in place after the coup. Demands to chip away at this “constitution of the dictatorship,” as it is referred to in Chile, are present in Chilean social movements, most recently the student movements seeking to reform the deeply unequal private higher education system. The reforms that were the bedrock of a reactionary counter-revolution in the country were brought about through force, violence, and physical coercion as seen in the torture and systematic repression of the regime’s opponents.

The maintenance of such a regime could only be guaranteed through the dissolution of civil society to ensure that all avenues of dissent were illegal. Political representation in the National Congress was impossible because it was dissolved as civil liberties were proscribed. Organizations of a civil society, including unions, political parties, and groups set up by the Catholic Church to tend to the needs of the families of the disappeared, were treated as opposition organizations and were forbidden. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Chileans were tortured, while up to 200,000 were exiled, shocking the population into submission through fear. The laws regulating dissent were so strict that when the plebiscite was held to transition to democracy, special arrangements needed to be made to allow political groups the ability to organize and campaign, an attempt to reinvigorate a minimal civic culture in the country.

While Chile was the first and one of the main examples of the growth of neoliberalism, it has been far from unique. Economic “shock therapy” has become central to U.S. foreign policy, from Argentina in 1976 to the reintegration of post-communist states into the global capitalist economy. A quick comparison between countries listed as “not-free” by Freedom House and those that employ free-market neoliberal policies stresses this point. From Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in Central Asia, to the crisis-ridden state of Mexico, and the neoliberal reforms of dictators in the Middle East and North Africa, the notion that capitalism and democracy form a symbiotic relationship and support each other has been debunked. The dissolution of civil society goes hand in hand with the imposition of a neoliberal state through violence, in order to ensure that threats to the state’s activities remain unchallenged.

Core Neoliberal States

In core countries, meanwhile, austerity and authoritarianism follow a different pattern. There, neoliberal political systems have been created through financial coercion and are held hostage by financial interests due to the economic “necessities” created by bankruptcies and budget deficits. The test in this case is New York City, where the consequences of the depression of 1974-75 run deep. Kim Moody, in From Welfare State to Real Estate, traces the political and economic alliance that took advantage of social pressures from deindustrialization, white flight, and global economic crisis to implement the reforms that would give rise to a complete transformation of the city’s social fabric. His analysis shows how a united business elite was able to thwart the democratic interests of the city’s working classes by using the budget, the deficit, and financial coercion to rein in what they saw as an unsustainable welfare state. A crisis regime was put in place representing a business class unified in its desire to reshape the social democratic polity of New York City, using the city government to achieve this transformation. What began as a move by bankers to shut the city out of the bond market evolved by 1975 into the establishment of the Emergency Financial Control Board, which set its sights on imposing tuition on the City University of New York system, increasing the fares for mass transit, and limiting welfare payments. It’s a story that has become all too familiar in the twenty-first century and a tactic that is being replayed in other cities, states, and nations.

Given the history of uninterrupted constitutional rule in the United States, the installation of neoliberalism requires the engineering of society through the transformation of institutions. By giving the market the freedom to determine when wages will be lowered, when jobs will be shed, and when communities will be destroyed, while simultaneously dismantling social welfare programs to increase the market’s authority, a social crisis is produced that requires a police force to maintain order. This relationship has inspired the work of sociologist Loïc Wacquant for two decades. Combining a Marxist materialist approach to observe the socio-economic conditions that have influenced the growth of the American penal system with a Durkheimian symbolic perspective, which stresses how the prison serves as a symbol of disciplining power, his work Punishing the Poor argues that the expansion of correctional facilities should be seen as correlated with the rise of the neoliberal state. He notes how “welfare reform” corresponded with the expansion of the imprisoned population, signaling a shift in how contemporary neoliberal society treats the most vulnerable among us. This means that not only do prisons and jails serve as the place to physically keep those who have been convicted of criminal behavior, but they also serve as an alternative source of labor-power harvesting. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution explicitly allows penal labor, and while this has historically been organized by state-run corporations such as UNICOR, recent legislation allows the private sector to tap into the penal labor pool. Meant as an alternative to outsourcing, this practice is referred to as “smart-sourcing” (see http://www.unicor.gov/services/contact_helpdesk/).

The consequences of neoliberal reform and the penal society in the United States are related in more ways than one. While prisons are filled with those who have been affected by the welfare-to-workfare policies and war-on-drugs-era sentencing laws of the 1980s and 1990s, prisons are also an example of the process of privatizing government institutions and insuring that those institutions create profit for private investors, making the neoliberal state an agent in this wealth redistribution. The process of regulatory capture, where special interests are able to control the agencies that are supposed to be regulating them in the public interest, illustrates this point. While the market dictates the scope of what is possible for state institutions that are beholden to government funding, the market also creates the conditions, during periods of financial crisis, that lead to the bankrupting of state institutions through austerity measures and the privatization of these public assets.

Europe has also been subjected to the establishment of neoliberalism through financial coercion; however, the European case presents us with an instance of unprecedented democratic subversion on behalf of international capital. This is not to say that the establishment of neoliberalism has been imposed from the outside with no domestic encouragement, but rather that Europe presents us with a particular case of an alliance between the bourgeoisie of individual European nation-states and their counterparts in international institutions such as the European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB). The rise of the political party Syriza in Greece and the election of Alexis Tsipras as prime minister, while nurturing a cautious hope, has also shown the extent to which the democratic aspirations of the citizens of Greece are sabotaged for the benefit of financial interests represented by the European Commission, the ECB, and the International Monetary Fund. The sovereignty of European countries is being attacked by advocates of neoliberalism under the guise of EU and ECB policy. In Italy, the technocratic government of Mario Monti was appointed without an election following the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi. Meanwhile in Ireland, the ECB held the democratically elected government in a stranglehold by attaching a series of austerity conditions to any bailout agreement. In practice, democratic demands must be made within the tight parameters that have been established by bankers, making a mockery of democracy itself.

The manifestation and maintenance of neoliberalism in Europe can be understood through the changing notions of citizenship in European countries. While at one time the citizenry was the sole constituency, a new group has evolved that claims dominance over the nation-state: creditors. According to the German political economist Wolfgang Streeck, in his work Buying Time: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, the growth of creditors has placed a strain on the state, allowing unelected and anti-democratic authorities to regulate how the state handles its relations with its citizens, and defining the nature of state-society relations. The introduction of this “constituency” of opposing interests into the political equation holds the polity of Europe within a loop. On the one hand, the government is supposed to be representative of the people, while on the other, international forces are recognized as citizens and therefore claim a voice in how the government conducts its business. While the neoliberal state was imposed through financial coercion, it is maintained through the creation of new political constituencies.

Conclusion

By blending the state theories of Miliband and Poulantzas, we are able to see the neoliberal state in a multidimensional form. It is not solely the result of the decisions of those in power, but also a complex system that constructs its own acquiescence. The neoliberal state is a qualitatively distinct form of the capitalist state. Its authoritarianism is present not only in its unquestioned defense of the interests of capital, but also in the way that it actively seeks to shape society to be more favorable to its goals. Peripheral countries have borne the burden of this violence as their position within the world system is secondary and practically dispensable. Core countries require a much more skilled intervention through the introduction of reforms and the transformation of institutions to solidify obedience in the form of the market society. Austerity, understood as a social-historical force, is the tool of the neoliberal state to subvert democracy and promote authoritarianism.

The Reason You Work So Hard to Participate in the Rat Race

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By M.J. Higby

Source: Waking Times

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A man in debt is so far a slave.” Money has no intrinsic value yet we spend our days damaging our health and spirit in order to obtain it. Why do we sacrifice our well-being for it? Is it the cliché that “we just want to provide a better life for our kids than we had?” Is it just way of the civilized world? The most important question to ask, however, is what power do we have to change this way of thinking and living? The reality is simple: money is a vehicle for social control. Debt makes us good, obedient workers and citizens.

The traditional workweek started in 1908 at The New England Cotton Mill in order to allow followers of the Jewish religion to adhere to Sabbath. With the passage of The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the 40-hour workweek became the norm. Data from the 2013 American Community Survey showed that the average commute time in America is about 26 minutes each way. According to a Gallup poll, the average workweek in America is 34.4 hours, however, when only taking into account full time workers, that average shoots up to 47, or 9.4 hours per day during a 5-day workweek. Keeping averages in mind then, between commuting, working and figuring in an hour for lunch (usually less), that puts us at approximately 11 hours and 40 minutes for the average full time worker. If you have a family with young kids, just add in another few hours for homework, baths, etc.

When the day is done, how much time do you have for yourself? To exercise, meditate or otherwise unwind the way that all the healthy living gurus preach? And how much of yourself, your presence of mind, is left to devote to family? We give the company the heat of our most intense mental fire while our families get the smoke. Yet Jeb Bush, the 2016 GOP presidential hopeful, says we need to work more.

The answer to why we put ourselves through this daily grind is multifaceted. The most pervasive reason is workplace and societal pressures. We are raised in a matrix of sorts. The cycle starts around the age of five when we are expected to adhere to a regimented 8-hour day of school. At this age, we don’t have the intellect to question why, so we mechanistically follow the path that’s laid out. This daily path becomes engraved in our minds and becomes as automatic as the sun’s daily journey. Our school system is adept at churning out working class individuals en masse. We are taught along the way not to question authority, again adhering to the working class mentality.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are those in power. They are the ones that like to color outside the lines. Many books abound with titles such as The Wisdom of Psychopaths that illustrate how people with psychopathic traits, ones who don’t tend to follow rules, are often found in managerial roles such as CEOs all the way up to presidents of countries. With these rare manipulative, coldhearted personalities in place and the rest of us following like good sheeple without questioning, the stage is set for compliance.

If you have been in the working world long enough, then the following statement should ring true: if you work extra hours, you are a great worker; if you decline, you’re useless and apathetic. In the work world, there’s typically no in between. The pressure to succeed for the pride and benefit of the company unfortunately supersedes that of the pressure to be a good parent, sibling, son or daughter. According to a study done by the economic policy institute, between 1948 and 2013, productivity has grown 240% while income for non-managerial workers has grown by 108%. To make up for this discordance, pride of doing what’s best for the company has been employed as a motivational tactic. This tactic has been used as a sharp IV needle that’s been inserted into our veins and we have willingly ingested the contents that are injected through it. Pressure to conform toward achieving the company’s goals has overcome our will to be compensated accordingly.

The other side of this pressure comes from society as a whole outside the education/workplace. A close friend of mine works for a state court and makes about $40K/year. He is also a self-employed business owner on the off hours. I estimate that he works about 70-80 hours a week. He owns a home in a well-to do neighborhood and he drives a seventy thousand dollar luxury car. This crystallizes the saying ‘big hat, no cattle.’ But when a lie is told over and over, the lie becomes the truth.

When we look at someone who drives a luxury car and lives in an upscale part of town, we see this as success because of how often that visual of it has been pounded tirelessly into our minds. We fail to see that these are nothing but symbols of success and false ones at that. They appear real because as a society, we have been conditioned to see them this way by the advertising industry. In the book, The Millionaire Next Door, the authors annihilate this illusion. Numbers don’t lie and the statistics show that most true millionaires, those with a net worth of over one million dollars, do not own those luxuries that we typically associate with success and wealth. They view them as the reality of what they are: a depreciating liability. According to the book, the typical millionaire owns a home in the two to three hundred thousand dollar-range and a non-luxury automobile. If something goes wrong with either, they have the cash reserves to fix it. On the other hand, the commonplace owner of the luxury home and car can’t afford the roof and the tires respectively without going deeper into debt if they should need replacing.

Ownership of these symbols of wealth becomes a self-perpetuating illusion to satisfy the psychological need for acceptance. Unfortunately, human behavior dictates that emotional needs often override logical thinking. It’s been said that the borrower is slave to the debt-owner and with luxury items, debt is the rule, not the exception. Debt is healthy for those in power and contributes to a needy and thus obligated worker.

The current wisdom of slave, spend and save for retirement has only one destiny. That destiny can be summed up in three sentences. Spend your healthiest and most productive years working to support a life of materials and thus illusions of success while elevated stress damage your health. During this time, be sure to save enough money for retirement so you can enjoy those years of the subsequent poor health. And lastly, do it in the name of pride for your company and country.

I take pride in being American, as I’m sure most Americans do, however, if you’re reading this you’re likely smart enough to see the holes in the daily grind. It saps our creative potential and our physical, as well as our spiritual energy. We don’t need any studies to tell us how stressed we are and subsequently, how unhealthy we are. The physical manifestations of stress such as obesity, hypertension, heart disease, increased risk of cancer, depression, anxiety and many others tell us all we need to know. They tell us that we need a better work/life balance. They tell us that the pendulum has swung too much in the direction of work and away from life. Fortunately, there’s a way that we can take it back.

The most important way to restore this balance is to realize the power that we, as consumers, hold. Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the film, Fight Club said it best…

“…advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

The marketing and advertising industry know, more than anyone else, what motivates the human mind and how to tap into those instinctual drives. To defend against this industries seductiveness, we need to journey within ourselves and bring to light what’s really important to us. What most of us will find is that experiences and time well spent, not materials, are what makes us happy. In the book, aptly titled Well Being, the authors Tom Rath and Jim Harter discuss how experiences have been proven to make us happier than material posessions.

We revel in the anticipation of the experience, we enjoy the experience itself and we look back on it fondly for as long as we live. We do this while the expensive car or house that we borrowed money long ago to obtain falls apart causing us to borrow more money. If we live according to the rule that everything we purchase, with the exception of a home, is acquired by cash, then we fail to become slaves to debt and by extension, work. We no longer relinquish our power to creditors.

Oscar Wilde was famously quoted as saying that anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. Materialistically speaking, living by this notion will bind us with shackles to a life of debt servitude. When we rip those shackles of debt from our wrists, our minds become clear and we see what truly makes us happy. We spend more time with friends and family. We focus on our passions and hobbies. In essence, we get back to the foundation of what it means to be human. After all, none of us will ever arrive upon the mountain of our last moments of existence wishing we spent more time at the office. We will instead arrive wishing we completed that book, that painting or that experience with those we love most. For those can be purchased not with debt, but with time. And there is no more cunning, covert and deceitful thief of time as that villain we call debt.

About the Author

M.J. Higby practices medicine in Phoenix, AZ. He is passionate about martial arts, most notably Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He enjoys writing about mental, spiritual and physical well being and questioning the methods by which we attain it. You can reach him on Facebook and Twitter @MJHigby

LEVIATHAN: The end of history has arrived and it is in post-Soviet Russia

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Lauren Carroll Harris

Source: Adbusters

Within contemporary Russian film, it seems there is an ability to make the grandest statements from the smallest stories. From the insides of tiny flats, dying towns and treeless bays, directors like Andrey Zvyagintsev are able to tell big morality tales of corruption, futility, class and superstition that are at once national and universal in their scope and ambition. Zvyaginstev’s latest film, Leviathan, offers the newest iteration of these massive themes.

Our ‘Job’, Kolya, is a hotheaded everyman, whose house and land are to be seized, razed and developed by the corrupt major. His old lawyer friend from Moscow, Dmitri, must resort to blackmail to defend him, his second wife Lilya looks on despairingly, and his son Roma is busy learning how to drink in the ruins of a nearby church. Our protagonist is never idealized, nor is his gut reaction – to fight – rendered noble, it is merely taken for granted that he is on the edge of a last chance cliff. This is a story of one man against a terrible system and his fate is sealed from the start. It follows that even Leviathan’s portrayals of beautiful things are heavy with doom: the whale carcass in the film’s poster is the film’s strongest visual statement of political futility.

In all these contemporary Russian films I’ve seen – Zvyaginstev’s third film Elena, last year’s The Fool – concepts of social justice are dismissed as naive. The protagonists inch closer to their foregone conclusions blindly, the humor is black and the philosophical currency is fatalism. As in last year’s Two Days, One Night, there is humanity in the fightback, but unlike that film, Leviathan and its cohort underline the tragedy and futility of the fightback. The tides, the courts, the politicians, the priests – all carry on, undeterred. The end of history may have arrived, but not in post-Soviet Russian cinema, where it is accepted that history merely repeats, and repeats and repeats. What if there’s no march of progress? What if the world is growing flatter? Those questions at Leviathan’s heart are threatening for their antithetical stance to one of capitalism’s most inherent and foundational myths: that progress and growth is happening and will always happen. But what I found the most demoralizing thing about Leviathan is that it forestalls the march of progress because its only vision of post-capitalist political change is backwards – towards Stalinism. In that respect, the film is emblematic of the world’s lack of political imagination of visualizing alternatives to the current neoliberal ways of doing and thinking – in that way it is complementary with capitalism’s ‘end of history’ narrative.

In this respect, Leviathan’s global success – it is perhaps the most critically lauded foreign art-house film of 2015 so far – may speak to the way in which it tells Westerners what they already know and want to hear about Russia. It illuminates the truths about that post-socialist country that those in the West look down upon with the assurance of someone from a self-declared ‘democracy’ and reinforces Russia as blackly enigmatic. Never mind the continued use of torture in the USA, or the flagrant assaults on the human rights of asylum seekers in Australia: to foreign viewers, the idea of Russia as a black-hole for human rights is a seductive myth that distracts from their own societies’ hypocrisies.

Perhaps the most despairing storytelling technique in Leviathan is the visual concealment of key plot points. The film’s grimmest, most violent moments – Lilya’s affair with Dmitri, their altercation in the wilderness, Kolya’s retaliative attack, Dmitri’s beating at the hands of the mayor’s thugs – none of these are shown, just the moments leading up to them and following them. There’s something distinctly anti-Hollywood in Zvyaginstev’s withholding and something more violent. What we imagine is far more brutal, far more sinister and the present state of everything is both unimaginable and bitterly accepted. If Leviathan is a masterpiece, and by all critical consensus it is, it’s a masterpiece of political pessimism. The end of history has arrived and it is in post-Soviet Russia.

—Lauren Carroll Harris is a PhD Candidate and Sydney based writer.

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.

So how should we “really” refer to these United States of America?

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Dave Lefcourt

Source: OpEdNews.com

So how should we really refer to these United States of America? A banana republic? How about an oligarchic plutocracy? They both fit quite admirably with what we’ve become. Actually I prefer the more vernacular US of BS. Sure it’s crude, base, coarse and of course “politically incorrect” but take a close look at America.

In almost every area one can think of it’s pretty much the same. Truth and honesty is what we’re indoctrinated with, yet in reality we’re a country imbued with dishonesty and lying. Hell, even with little kids nowadays it’s the parents always yammering “good job” here and “good job” there. My god, leave the little tyke alone. He, she will get it together without the constant praising fearing without it he’ll somehow become a failure.

Think about it; from the way we conduct war to being held personally accountable, the “American Dream” to our “color blindness” on race, from “official” Washington to the “independent” MSM, and how it’s all dispensed to the people, it’s all the same BS.

We go to war to bring “freedom and democracy” to the people we invade and occupy. That’s how “dubya” Bush put it to the American people. We commit torture but call it “enhanced interrogation techniques”. We kill innocents in those wars but refer to it as “collateral damage”; come on.

This didn’t all begin with our latest wars against “terrorists”. In Viet Nam, it was the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Communists and every VC we killed were the “enemy” including women and children. “Winning” that war was calculated based on the number of “enemy” reported killed. Read Nick Turse’s, “Kill Anything That Moves” where “My Lai” wasn’t an aberration-as the Army said it was-but an everyday occurrence. Terrorists are just the latest manifestation of a contrived, mortal “enemy” we’re told we must fight.

Now everyone we kill are all called “terrorists”, insurgents, al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS. But of course our killing with drones and missile strikes isn’t “terrorism” it’s what; winning the “hearts and minds”?

Go back further to our wars and “diplomacy” with our own indigenous people. It was all part of what we were taught in our schools called, “Manifest Destiny”. Well that was manifested with every treaty “official” Washington brokered with the true natives of this country being broken. The indigenous know it and now live with the circumstances that was forcibly thrust upon them. Plundering, confiscating the land and what’s now called genocide was really what it was about. You know, “from sea to shining sea”.

As far as who is held to account for their actions today, it’s mostly the poor, black or brown, those profiled, harassed, rousted and often killed but rarely are the police held accountable for their actions.

In the Ferguson police killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury exonerated officer Darren Wilson even though one of those testifying had earlier admitted to prosecutor Bob McCulloch to not being at the scene-which he later publicly stated she “clearly wasn’t present at the scene”- yet he let the panel hear her false testimony and they subsequently voted to acquit Wilson. As for McCulloch I believe he remains as the prosecutor in Ferguson.

We’re supposed to be “color blind” when it comes to race and ethnicity and enforcing the law, yet it’s not just Ferguson where the injustice is occurring it’s a country wide phenomenon. Our largest minorities are those disproportionately incarcerated. Justice? What justice? And for whom?

The “American Dream…a hoax. “Work hard, get an education, get a good job, get married and own a big house”. Maybe that’s true for a handful but the reality for most college students is debt for life. There’s over a $trillion in college student debt with outrageous interest rates tacked on. Too many are working as bartenders and wait staff. They can’t find jobs in their area of study as outsourcing of jobs has become endemic.

As “Americans” we embrace “capitalism” and despise “socialism”. Yet when the financial “masters of the universe” and the big banks brought the financial system to its knees with its fraudulent excesses in 2008, they were “bailed” out by the FED and the US Treasury-and unlike college students now get $billions in FED loans at near zero interest rates. It was government “socialism” that came to the rescue keeping the vultures afloat but sold as a “bailout” to the public. As far as “accountability” for the fraud they committed, other than a few millions in fines-and always with the stipulation they admit no wrongdoing as part of the settlement- that were miniscule and insignificant compared to the billions they made with their financial scheming, it was simply a financial bump in the road. And most significantly none went to jail. How’s that for equal justice under the law!

Our “defense” industry, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman -the big five of the lot- are considered as “independent” corporations but they’re all pretty much owned by the Defense Department-formerly known as the “War Department” until changed after WWII-as the bulk of their earnings is from government spending called innocently as “fiscal” policy. Well that fiscal policy goes to the tune of a $trillion each year when all expenditures are considered i.e. armaments, over a 1000 military bases, wars and occupations, homeland security, NGO’s directly funded by the government, the NSA, CIA, independent contractors, NASA, the VA et al. All against “enemies” not really a threat but conjured up as so to the public to make them fearful so “official” Washington can justify the bloated, unnecessary expenditures.

Every other 1st world post industrialized country has public health insurance for all, in essence a single payer, Medicare type system run by the government. Accept for those 65 and older on Medicare in this country we now have “Obama” care, the Affordable Care Act system still leaves millions without health insurance. But it sure increased the “benefits” to the private health care behemoths, essentially a monopoly with no competition- whereby they divide the country into distinct areas so they don’t compete with each other, akin to the mafia, that is inefficient, has excessive overhead costs but sold as the best health system in the world while in actuality its 37th in the world in delivering health care. So to an imagined “good ole boy” who remarks, “We ain’t got no stinkin socialized medicine in this country. What are ya some kinda commie or somethin?” Ah, but I digress.

And lastly- there’s no way to elaborate on all the BS befouling America in such a short piece; just substitute your own; the crock is endless – there’s the corporate MSM. What may have been a time of an independent free press, naturally skeptical of government with investigative journalism unearthing official wrongdoing has descended into what can best be described as the “ministry of propaganda”, a compliant, complicit, enabling organ of the state.

It “informs” us alright but mostly with lies, distortions and misinformation rather than keeping the public informed with the truth as it really is, not some fictionalized version to keep it in good stead with “official” Washington.

But that corporate MSM fits in quite nicely with this pieces hypothesis, the US of BS.

And an increasingly dangerous one at that not only to others in the world but also for Americans.

But don’t tell that to most Americans, we’re still “the land of the free and the home of the brave” .

Yeah, BS to the very end.

About the Author:

Retired. The author of “DECEIT AND EXCESS IN AMERICA, HOW THE MONEYED INTERESTS HAVE STOLEN AMERICA AND HOW WE CAN GET IT BACK”, Authorhouse, 2009

Does Work Undermine our Freedom?

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John Danaher

Source: Philosophical Disquisitions

Work is a dominant feature of contemporary life. Most of us spend most of our time working. Or if not actually working then preparing for, recovering from, and commuting to work. Work is the focal point, something around which all else is organised. We either work to live, or live to work. I am fortunate in that I generally enjoy my work. I get paid to read, write and teach for a living. I can’t imagine doing anything else. But others are less fortunate. For them, work is drudgery, a necessary means to a more desirable end. They would prefer not to work, or to spend much less time doing so. But they don’t have that option. Society, law and economic necessity all conspire to make work a near-essential requirement. Would it be better if this were not the case?

In recent months, I have explored a number of affirmative answers to this question. Back in July 2014, I looked at Joe Levine’s argument for the right not to work. This argument rested on a particular reading of the requirements of Rawlsian egalitarianism. In brief, Levine felt that Rawlsian neutrality with respect to an individual’s conception of the good life required some recognition of a right to opt out of paid labour. Then, in October 2014, I offered my own general overview of the anti-work literature, dividing the arguments up into two categories: intrinsic badness arguments (which claimed that there was something intrinsically bad about work) and opportunity cost arguments (which claimed that even if work was okay, non-work was better).

In this post, I want to explore one more anti-work argument. This one comes from an article by Julia Maskivker entitled “Employment as a Limitation on Self-Ownership”. Although this argument retreads some of the territory covered in previous posts, I think it also offers some novel insights, and I want to go over them. I do so in several parts. First, I offer a brief overview of Maskivker’s central anti-work argument. As we’ll see, this argument has two contentious premises, each based on three claims about freedom and justice. I then spend the next three sections looking at Maskivker’s defence of those three claims. I will then focus on some criticisms of her argument, before concluding with a general review.

1. Maskivker’s Anti-Work Argument
I’ll actually start with a mild criticism. Although I see much of value in Maskivker’s article, and although I learned a lot from it, I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed reading it. Large parts of it felt disorganised, needlessly convoluted, and occasionally repetitious. Although she introduced a central normative claim early on — viz. a claim about the need for effective control self-ownership — later parts of her argument seemed to stray from the strict requirements of that concept. This left me somewhat confused as to what her central argument really was. So what follows is very much my own interpretation of things and should be read with that caveat in mind.

Anyway, let’s start by clarifying what it is we are arguing against. In the past, I have lamented the fact that definitions of work are highly problematic. They are often value-laden, and prone to the sins of under and over-inclusiveness. I’m not sure that there can ever be a perfect definition of work, one that precisely captures all the phenomena of interest to those making the anti-work critique. Nevertheless, we need something more concrete, and Maskivker duly provides. She defines work as paid labour. That is, labour that is undertaken for the purposes of remuneration. This definition is simple and covers what is central to her own argument. My only complaint is that it may need to be expanded to cover forms of labour that are not directly remunerated but are undertaken in the hope of eventually being remunerated (e.g. work of entrepreneurs in the early stages of a business, or the work of unpaid interns). But this is just a quibble.

With that definition in place, we can proceed to Maskivker’s anti-work argument itself. That argument is all about the freedom-undermining effect of work. Although this argument is initially framed in terms of a particular conception of freedom as effective control self-ownership (something I previously covered when looking at the work of Karl Widerquist), I believe it ends up appealing to a much broader and more ecumenical understanding of freedom. As follows:

(1) If a phenomenon undermines our freedom, then it is fundamentally unjust and we should seek to minimise or constrain it.

(2) A phenomenon undermines our freedom if: (a) it limits our ability to choose how to make use of our time; (b) it limits our ability to be the authors of our own lives; and/or (c) it involves exploitative/coercive offers.

(3) Work, in modern society, (a) limits our ability to choose how to make use of our time; (b) limits our ability to be the authors of our own lives; and c) involves an exploitative/coercive offer.

(4) Therefore, work undermines our freedom.

(5) Therefore, work is fundamentally unjust and should be minimised or constrained.

You could alter this, as Maskivker seems to wish to do, by turning it into an argument for a right not to work. Though I will discuss this general idea later on, I’m avoiding that construal of the argument for the simple reason that it requires additional explanation. Specifically, it requires some explanation of what it would mean to have a right not to work, and some answer to the question as to why it is felt that we do not currently have a right not to work (after all, we can choose not to work, can’t we?). I think time would be better spent focusing specifically on the freedom-undermining effect of work and its injustice, rather than on the precise social remedy to this problem.

What about the rest of the argument. Well, premise (1) is a foundational normative assumption, resting on the value of freedom in a liberal society. We won’t question it here. Premise (2) is crucial because it provides more detail on the nature of freedom. Although Maskivker may argue that the three freedom-undermining conditions mentioned in that premise are all part of the what she means by effective control self-ownership, I think it better not to take that view. Why? Because I think some of the conditions appeal to other concepts of freedom that are popular among other political theorists, and it would be better not to limit the argument to any particular conception. Moving on, premise (3) is the specific claim about the freedom-undermining effect of work. Obviously, this too is crucial to Maskivker’s overall case. The two conclusions then follow.

Let’s go through the two central premises in more detail. Let’s do so in an alternating structure. That is to say, by looking at the defence of condition (a) in premise (2) and premise (3); then at the defence of condition (b) in premise (2) and premise (3); and finally at the defence of condition (c) in premise (2) and premise (3).

2. Freedom, Time and the 24/7 Workplace
Condition (a) is all about the need for an ability to choose how to use our time. Maskivker defends this requirement by starting out with a Lockean conception of freedom, one that is often beloved by libertarians. The Lockean conception holds that individuals are free in the sense that they have self-ownership. That is to say: they have ownership rights over their own bodies, and the fruits of their labour. This fundamental right of self-ownership in turn implies a bundle of other rights (e.g. the right to transfer the fruits of one’s labour to another). Any system of political authority must respect this fundamental right and its necessary implications.

The problem for Maskivker is that many fans of self-ownership limit themselves to a formal, rather than an effective, conception of that right. In other words, they simply hold, in the abstract, that individuals have this right of self-ownership and that they should not be interfered with when exercising it. They don’t think seriously about what it would take to ensure that everybody was really able to effectively enjoy this right. If they did this, they would realise that there are a number of social and evolutionary imbalances and injustices in the ability of individuals to exercise self-ownership. They would realise that, in order to effectively enjoy the right, individuals will also need access to resources.

Now, to be fair, some writers do recognise this. And they highlight the need for things like adequate education and healthcare in order for the right to self-ownership to be effective. Maskivker agrees with their approach. The originality of her contribution comes in its insistence on the importance of time as an essential resource for self-ownership. Time is, in many ways, the ultimate resource. Time is necessary for everything we do. Everything takes time. Other skills and abilities that we may have, only really have value when we have the time to exercise them. Furthermore, time is a peculiarly non-manipulable resource. There is a limited amount of time in which we get to act out our lives. This makes it all the more important for people to have access to time.

You can probably see where this is going. The problem with work is that it robs us of time. We need jobs in order to live, and they take up most of our time. Some people argue that the modern realities of work are particularly insidious in this regard. Jonathan Crary, in his slightly dystopian and alarmist work, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, notes how work has colonised our every waking hour and how it threatens to colonise our sleep too. We are encouraged to make our time more productive, but also to be available to our workplaces at more times of the day, through email or social media. Indeed, the slow death of the regular 9-to-5 workday has, if anything, encouraged work to monopolise more of time. We have flexible working hours and our work may be more outcome-driven, but the marketplaces are open 24/7 and they demand more outcomes from us. The result is an infiltration of work into every hour of the day.

Some people may not resent this. They may feel that they are living the kind of life they wish to live, that their work is enjoyable, and that it gives them a sense of purpose. But others will feel differently. They will feel that work takes away valuable opportunities to truly express themselves as they wish.

In sum, access to time and the time-limiting nature of work, is one thing to think about when designing a scheme of distributive justice. An ability to opt out of work, or to have much less of it one’s lives may be necessary if we are to have a just society.

3. Freedom and Authorship of One’s Life
There is a related argument to made here about the ability to choose one’s time. It can be connected to Maskivker’s account of effective self-ownership, but it can also be separated from it. That’s what condition (b) is about. It appeals to a distinctive notion of freedom as being the ability to exercise true authorship over one’s life. This is a slightly more metaphysical ideal of freedom, one that joins up with the debate about free will and responsibility.

To understand the idea, we need to think more about the individual who truly enjoys their work. As I suggested at the end of the previous section, you could argue that there is nothing unjust about the current realities of work for such an individual. Granting them more free time, won’t really help them to exercise more effective self-ownership. They are getting what they want from life. Take me for example. I have already said that I enjoy my work, and I have been able to (I think) select a career that best suits my talents and abilities. I’m pretty sure I’m employing the scarce resource of time in a way that allows me to maximise my potential. I’m pretty sure there is nothing fundamentally unjust or freedom-undermining about my predicament.

Nevertheless, Maskivker wants to argue that there is something fundamentally unjust about my predicament. My freedom is not being respected in the way that it should. Despite all my claims about how much I enjoy my work, the reality is that I have to work. I have no real say in the matter. She uses an analogy between starving and fasting to make her point. When a person is starving or fasting, the physical results are often the same: their bodies are being deprived of essential nutrients. But there is something morally distinct about the two cases. The person who fasts has control over what is happening to their body. The person who is starving does not. The person who chooses to fast has authorship over their lives; the person who is starving is having their story written by someone else.

When it comes to our work, there is a sense in which we are all starving not fasting. We may enjoy it, embrace it and endorse it, but at the end of the day we have to do it. That’s true even in societies with generous welfare provisions, as most of those welfare provisions are conditional upon us either looking for work (and proving that we are doing so), or being in some state of unavoidable disability or deprivation. We are not provided us with an “easy out”, or with the freedom we need to become the true authors of our lives. (Maskivker notes that the introduction of a universal basic income could be a game-changer in this regard).

As I said, in appealing to this notion of self-authorship, Maskivker is touching upon a more metaphysical ideal of freedom. Within the debate about free will, there are those that argue that the ability to do otherwise is essential for having free will. But there are also those (e.g. Harry Frankfurt and John Fischer) who argue that it is not. They sometimes say that being free and responsible simply requires the reflexive self-endorsement of one’s actions and attitudes. The ability to do otherwise is irrelevant. So what Maskivker is arguing is somewhat contentious, at least when considered in light of these other theories of freedom. She claims that her theory better captures the normative ideal of freedom. But there is much more to be said about this issue.

4. Freedom and the Absence of Coercive Offers
The final condition of freedom — condition c) — is probably the most straightforward. It has its origins in the classic liberal accounts of freedom as non-interference by coercion. It is introduced by Maskivker in an attempt to address a possible weakness in the argument thus far. Someone could argue that the mere absence of acceptable alternatives to work is not enough to imply that it undermines our freedom, or that it creates a fundamental injustice.

An analogy might help to make the point. Suppose you are crossing the desert. You have run out of water and are unlikely to make it out alive. As you are literally on your last legs, you come across a man who is selling water from a small stand. He is, however, selling it at an obscene price. It will cost you everything you have to get one litre of water (which will be just enough to make it out). Because of your desperate situation, you hand over everything you have. Was your choice to hand over everything free? Was it just for the man to sell the water at that price? Many would argue “no” because you had no acceptable alternative.

But now consider a variation on this scenario. Suppose that this time the man is selling water at a very low price, well below the typical market rate. It will cost you less than one dollar to get a litre of water. You gratefully hand over the money. Was your choice free this time? Remember, you are still in a desperate state. All that has changed is the price. Nevertheless, there is something less disturbing about this example. Your choice seems more “free”, and the whole scenario seems more just.

The problem with the first case is that the man is exploiting your unfortunate situation. He knows you have no other choice and he wants to take you for everything that you’ve got. The second scenario lacks this feature. In that case, he doesn’t undermine your freedom, or violate some fundamental principle of justice, because he doesn’t exploit your misfortune.

How does this apply to Maskivker’s anti-work argument? Very simply. She claims that work, in the modern world, involves an exploitative bargain. There is no particular agent behind this exploitation. Rather, it is the broader society, with its embrace of the work ethic and its commitment to the necessity of work, that renders the decision to work exploitative:

Demanding fulltime work in exchange for a decent livelihood is comparable to demanding an exorbitant price for a bottle of water in the absence of competition. It leaves the individual vulnerable to the powerful party (society) in the face of the great loss to be suffered if the “offer” as stipulated is not taken (if one opts not to work while not independently wealthy)

(Maskivker 2010)

5. But isn’t the abolition of work impossible?
Thus ends the defence of Maskivker’s central argument. As you can see, her claim is that the modern realities of work are such that they undermine our freedom and create a fundamental injustice in our society. This is because (conjunctively or disjunctively) work monopolises our time and limits our effective self-ownership; the absence of a viable alternative to work prevents us from being the true authors of our live; and/or society is presenting us with an exploitative bargain “you better be working or looking for work or else…”. You may be persuaded on each of these points. You may agree that a full (positive?) right not to work would be nice. But you may think that it is naive and unrealistic. You may think that it is impossible to really avoid a life of work. Maskivker closes by considering two versions of this “impossibility” objection.

The first, which we might call the “strict impossibility” objection, works something like this:

(6) We all have basic needs (food, clothing, shelter etc); without these things we would die.

(7) We have to work in order to secure these basic needs.

(8) Therefore, we have to work.

Maskivker has a very simply reply to this version of the objection. She holds that premise (7) is false. Not all activities that are conducive to our survival are inevitable. At one point in time, we had to take the furs and hides of animals in order to stay warm enough to survive. We no longer have to do this. The connection between survival and procuring the furs and hides of animals has been severed. The same could happen to the connection between work and our basic needs. Indeed, it is arguable that we no longer need to work all that much to secure our basic needs. There are many labour saving devices in manufacturing and agriculture (and there are soon to be more) that obviate the need for work. And yet the social demand for work has, for some reason, not diminished. Surely this doesn’t have to be the case? Surely we could allow more machines to secure our basic needs?

The second impossibility objection, which we might call the “collective action” objection, is probably more serious. It holds that while a right not to work might be all well and good, the reality is that if everyone exercised that right, society would not be able to support its implementation. After all, somebody has to pay for the system. Maskivker’s responses to this objection are, in my opinion, somewhat problematic.

She makes one basic point. She says that the existence of a right is not contingent upon whether it may be impossible to recognise it in certain social contexts, or whether universal exercise of that right would lead to negative outcomes. She uses two analogies to support this point. First, she asks us to suppose that there is a universal right to healthcare. She then asks us to imagine that we live in a society in which there is some terrible natural disaster, which places huge strains on the healthcare system. The strains are such that the available resources will not be sufficient to save everyone. Maskivker argues that the universal right to healthcare still exists in this society. The limitations imposed by the natural disaster do not take away people’s rights. Second, she asks us to consider the right not to have children. She then points out that if everyone exercised the right not to have children, it would lead to a bad outcome: humanity would go extinct. Nevertheless, she argues, that this does not mean that the right not to have children does not exist.

In some ways, I accept Maskivker’s point. I agree that a right may exist in the abstract even if its implementation creates problems. But I don’t think that really addresses the collective action objection, and I don’t think her analogies work that well. With regards to the right to healthcare in the disasterzone, I’m inclined to think that the limitations of the available resources would compromise or limit the right to healthcare. And with regards to the right not to have children, I think there is something fundamentally different about the problems that arise when we collectively head towards our own extinction and the problems that might arise if everyone stopped working. In the former case, no individuals would be harmed by the collective exercise of the right: the future generations who would have existed, do not exist and cannot be harmed. But in the latter case, there are individuals who might be harmed. For example, if doctors and nurses stopped working, their patients would be harmed. So I’m not sure that Maskivker has really grappled with the collective action objection. I think she tries to sidestep it, but in a manner that will be unpersuasive to its proponents.

6. Conclusion
That brings me to the end of this post. To briefly sum up, Maskivker presents an anti-work argument that focuses on the ways in which work undermines our freedom. She argues that this happens in three ways. First, work robs us of time, which is an essential resource if we are to have effective self-ownership. Second, work prevents us from being the true authors of our lives because there is no acceptable alternative to work (even in societies with social welfare). And third, because work involves an exploitative bargain: we must work, or else.

I think there is much of value in Maskivker’s article. I like how she focuses on time as a resource, one which should be included in any scheme of distributive justice. I also like how she integrates the anti-work critique with certain aspects of the mainstream literature on freedom, self-control and justice. Nevertheless, I fear she dodges the collective action objection to the anti-work position. This is where I think that technology, and in particular a deeper awareness of the drive toward automation and technological unemployment could be a useful addition to the anti-work critique. But that’s an argument for another day.

It’s Time to Start Believing Again – Why Basic Income Could and Should be the Next Global Political Movement

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Source: Thought Infection

Things change slowly and then all at once.

If there is one great consistency about change in the 21st century, it is that things seem to change almost imperceptibly right up until they become inevitable. Many good examples of this effect can be found in the world of technology such as the rise of the internet, the fall of film-cameras, or the explosive growth of the green energy industry. In all of these cases the exponential nature of technological advances led many to discount major changes that eventually disrupted entire industries. While this effect is best understood in the world of technology I think this kind of change can also be seen in social and political spheres.

Political movements must by necessity start with only a minority of individuals working very hard for very many years to push forward on an issue. For a very long time it can appear that little or no progress is being made, but below the surface opinions and minds are slowly shifting. This slow progression continues in the background, almost imperceptibly until some sort of tipping point is reached and a sudden shift in the public and political sentiment can occur. A good example of this effect would be the momentous shift away from a deep and vitriolic hatred of gays only a few decades ago towards increasing acceptance today.

In addition to the energy provided by a small group of dedicated individuals, flashpoint social or political change also requires the maneuvering room in order for rapid revolutionary change to happen. The room for new ideas to maneuver can be created by a collapse of incumbent ideology, or in the case of the greatest shifts it often comes from a wider, systemic loss of faith in the system. When people become embittered with things as they are they will inevitably start looking to those offering alternative views.

A person without belief is a power vacuum.

I think we are currently stand at time when conditions are set for the next global political movement to take hold. We are seeing clear symptoms of a systemic erosion of faith in the political and economic systems as they stand today.

Economic hardship and unemployment has become endemic across large parts of the developed world. Those who do work find themselves squeezed between longer working hours, higher on the job demands, increasing costs of living, and loss of both job security and benefits.

Times feel tough, and people are starting to ask why they are tough. Did we have some sort of disaster? Are our crops failing, or our industries falling apart? What happened that is making institutions like education and health too expensive to support?

Thomas Piketty, in his recent book provides strong evidence that the economic pathology of the current geopolitical situation may simply be the symptoms of a larger economic disease. When capital out-competes labour, it inevitably leads to increasing wealth disparity and the associated economic problems that we see today. People can see that the economic gains that our collective hard-work creates is going disproportionately into the hands of the wealthy. People can see that the game is rigged against them, and they don’t really want to play any more.

At the same time as economic realities are being thrust upon workers around the world, people are also increasingly detached from mainstream politics. Little real change has happened despite perpetual political promises to deliver such. Political detachment combined with economic hardship is a dangerous mix, and is credited with leading to the rise of extreme political groups like the Golden Dawn in Greece and other far-right parties in the UK and France. The rise of more extremist politics is also apparent in the increasingly polarized and broken political landscape of the United States.

The disengagement of the public from the political sphere is particularly strong for those who are also disproportionately affected by the economic slow-down, the youth. It is an unappreciated fact that there are actually more millenials in the United States than there are baby boomers. Whatever politician figures out how to engage the millenial generation politically is going to run the world.

From my perspective, there seems to be a clear build-up of political tension across the globe. While we can argue about specific economic and political maladies that have led us to this point, I think the simple fact is that people are losing faith in the system as a whole. As people lose faith, governments become more detached and fearful of their citizens, leading more people to lose faith in the system, and thus a vicious cycle of political breakdown is perpetuated.

So how do we stop this?

The answer is surprisingly simple – We need to believe again.

People need to believe that the world will be better for their children than it was for them. This is the magic that drives people to get up in the morning and go to school and work, to put in the long hours of hard work, to make discoveries, to invent new technologies, and improve the world. The economy will flourish only as long as people truly believe they can better their own life, and that of their children.

Without faith in the global economic and political system, we have nothing.

Believe it or not, there just might be one simple medicine which (while it would not solve all of our problems) could go a long way to solving the twin problems of political and economic break down.

Basic income.

There is a long list of reasons that basic income makes for sensible economic policy, which I will not go through here. Suffice it to say that basic income would (1) give workers the leverage to demand more from work, (2) give individuals and innovators the means to do their thing, (3) give corporations more incentive to automate their production, and (4) generally support the consumption economy. (Some worry that such a basic income might lead to less incentive to work, but I say that if you need to use starvation as a threat to get people to work for you, then your business is not profitable enough.)

Perhaps most importantly, basic income would be the solution to restore the faith of the common individual in the current system of global capitalism. By institutionalizing the social contract in the form of a cash dividend for everyone, basic income would finally enshrine the promise that a rich and successful society must first deliver a minimal living standard to everyone.

Serious realistic types might rush to play down the importance of belief in the political system. Who cares whether the rabble believes in what the government and politicians do, as long as it is functional? But these people are completely missing the central truth of the matter here. Belief is the only power in the world that matters. My dollar is only worth what we collectively agree it to be worth, and the same goes for our societies. If we fail to create societies which inspire belief, then we are lost. If we do not find a way fill that vacuum left by eroding belief, then someone else will.

It is time for something that we can believe in, it is time for basic income.

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It’s Time to Start Believing Again – Why Basic Income Could and Should be the Next Global Political Movement