AMERICAN IDOL

            Will the Lord be pleased with your thousands of carcasses, with your ten thousand rivers of oil?  Shall you offer your firstborn for your transgression, the fruit of your body for the sin of your soul?   He has showed you what is good — what then does the Lord require of you but to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your Lord?

           Yet you defile his sanctuary and profane his holy name.  You have built the high places of Moloch to burn your sons in the fire as offerings to Moloch — to sullen Moloch, sceptered king, grisly king in dismal dance around his furnace, the strongest and the fiercest spirit that fought in heaven, now fiercer by despair — burning idol all of blackest hue.  Beneath every spreading tree in the Valley of Slaughter you burn with lust to immolate your children in the ravines and under overhanging crags.  Your children cry unheard as you fill each place with the blood of their sacrifice.  They pass through fire to your grim idol Moloch, to your horrid king besmeared with their blood and tears.

            Your Lord hates your religious feasts, he cannot stand your assemblies.  The Lord cries, “You have forsaken me and made this a place of strange worship!  Yet I said to Moses that any who gives his child to Moloch must be put to death – his own people are to stone him, for none is to profane the name of God who is the Lord.  If any of the community close their eyes when you give your children to Moloch and they fail to put you to death, I will set my face against them and will cut off all who follow in prostituting themselves to Moloch.

            “Away with the noise of your songs!  I will not listen to the music of your harps.  But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!  Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings forty years in the desert?

            “The idols among the smooth stones of the ravines are your portion; they, they are your lot.  Yes, to them you have poured out offerings.  In the light of these things, should I relent?  You have made your bed on a high and lofty hill; there you went up to offer your sacrifices.  Forsaking me, you uncovered your bed, you climbed into it and opened it wide; you made a pact with those whose beds you love, and you looked on their nakedness.  You went to Moloch with offerings of oil and increased your perfumes.  You sent your ambassadors far away; you descended to the grave itself!  You were wearied by all your ways, but you would not say, ‘It is hopeless.’

            “I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who seek their lives, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth.  I will devastate their cities and make them objects of scorn.  All who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all their wounds.  I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh during the terrors imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives.”

“What do you do with this knowledge? It’s too big.”

There is a pretty good documentary out there on the Weather Underground.  Towards the end, one of the most interesting of that group’s former members, Mark Rudd, asks — or, really, declares — a truly awesome thing: “What do you do with this knowledge?  It’s too big.”

What Rudd is referring to is the experience of knowing, really knowing, the depth of the corruption the world has reached.  He writes of the way this question is embedded in the film:

The thought still seems to strike both political and existential chords in many viewers.  You see me today uttering these words, then the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, then the 21 year-old, grief written all over my face.

Today I had a new inkling of this experience.  I read the following — telling what a parent’s concerns are — in a legally binding document stipulating the special education services to be provided for a teenage boy:

Mr. M— would like for W— to re-evaluate for Emotional Behavior Disorder, Mild Mental Retardation, and Other Health Impaired Services in 4/1/ 2011.  Mr. M— is concerned about gang affiliation of other students. He states that W— would attempt to immolate those students who portray they are in gangs. He would like to see W— in a class with students who will not have a negative influence on him behaviorally.

There is a level at which this is hilarious.  For one thing, the author of the document — who by law must have had at least a Master’s degree — surely meant emulate, not immolate.  Not that immolate doesn’t work in a certain sense, the kind that tells truths unintentionally in the language of the bureaucrat.  Read your Gogol.

But there’s another level at which it is not funny at all.  This is a document that must state the goals and objectives for the special education process rallied in support of the child.  Here are two of those written for this kid:

1.  When found sleeping in class, W— will identify one effect this has on his future.

2.  When found sleeping, W— will identify one effect this has on his family.

This, for a child who has been diagnosed with Schizophreniform Disorder, Paranoid Type, and Conduct Disorder.  His medications include Depakote, Geodon, Loxapine, Haldol and Cogentin.  It’s a wonder the child is ever awake.

Oh, and I almost forgot: goals like these must specify a criterion level for successful performance.  In both cases the criterion is 70% accuracy responding independently.  Upon rousing the Haldol-addled zombie, the guilt trip that is to keep him alert is seven-tenths of a reason why his slumbers are fucking up his family.

But we still have not reached the point of possessing knowledge that is too big.  That comes with the crowning realization about this atrocity, namely, that this is how the system looks when it is working.

This kid’s care has been privatized.  The provisions of these documents, written for a public school system, are being implemented by Universal Health Services, Inc., a Fortune 500 company that closed today at 38.82  +0.08 (0.21%).  Everything is going according to plan.  These awful words — When found sleeping, W— will identify one effect this has on his family — put more money in the pockets of UHS founder and CEO Alan B. Miller, whose total compensation last year was $12,006,675.  As this goes on, we keep sending crooks back to raid the till of public office, we threaten teachers with termination if they do not exact the performance expectations imposed by for-profit standardized testing, and we have no place — none — for a kid like this to graduate to except an increasingly privatized prison system.  (A propos of which, Corrections Corporation of America also closed up today, trading at 24.24 +1.67 (7.40%).

(Here’s a crazy surmise as an aside:  Over the summer, UHS laid off a bunch of low-paid residential staff at the hospital where our kid lives.  What do you want to bet that  (a.)  the increased levels of violence and mayhem at the facility caused by greater understaffing are dealt with by  (b.)  more prescriptions for zombifying drugs that  (c.)  increase inmate compliance while  (d.)  allowing UHS not only savings on staff costs but also a huge windfall on their cut of the drugs mark-up that  (e.)  allows that twat Alan B. Miller to gold-plate his dick, or whatever these people do with that kind of money.  But that’s just a surmise.)

What am I, what is anyone, to do with this much too much knowledge except become crazy, to tip over some edge into an abyss that ever beckons.  There is so little that beckons us back the other way.

Mark Rudd includes a section on his web site that carries the title “The Best Thing Ever Written About the Weathermen” and it reads in part:

I mean to say that groups like the Weathermen and the Panthers saw America quite clearly. But they were so unprepared for what they saw, and were so clearly lacking in any sense of viable strategies for dealing with what they saw, that they slid quickly and tragically into modes of reaction which were almost always hysterical, self-destructive, and self-defeating–to say nothing of their ineffectuality.  [...]

The violence of the Weathermen is evidence of two things: first that they saw their nation and its evils clearly, and, secondly, that they had no adequate response to what they saw, and so were driven to ends which partook perhaps too much of the evils they discovered. But how could they have avoided that? They had no readily available political traditions of patient resistence and dissidence to fall back on, and the political left by then had been decimated and divided by the Stalin Pact, the World War, factionalism, and old age. Nor had they any religious or secular moral framework into which they could put the evil they saw, or which would dictate or suggest an adequate response.

They were not, I think, essentially political, no matter how political their rhetoric got. They were moral apocalyptists, violent Anabaptists of a kind, godless in their response and yet driven by their discovery of evil as surely as those in the past for whom God was (I say this, remember, as a purely secular man) the only adequate force or value to pit against evil. And they were, finally, quintessentially American, partaking, ironically and yet unavoidably, of precisely the values (or the absence of values) they abhorred. They had discovered the moral void at the heart of American life; they were shocked, astonished, transformed,; but they had nowhere to go with their vision of the void but straight into it, and in they went, losing themselves, perhaps, in what they feared and opposed. It could not – given the nature of the nature of the nation and age – have been otherwise.

There remain ways that all this too much knowledge works in the favor of those who would resist the system from beyond the edge.  Concerning the ways that the Weathermen were able to remain on the lam for so long, Rudd remarks:

We evaded them because of the tightness of our networks—family, friends, political supporters—and also because of the intelligence agencies’ inherent disability, too much information.  With all the information they have, how would they ever be able to figure out which is useful and which is noise?  It all amounts to noise.

This is the logic, of course, of the zone of opacity:  Exploit the noise to stay below it, below the radar of the national security state.  It’s a grand thing so far as it goes, but I still haven’t worked out how it busts this kid out of the UHS hospital/school/prison — Foucault validated — and into a better life.

It is one thing for there to be communities of resistance, but another again for there to be communities of wisdom.  How are we to find them, or become them ourselves?

Postscript.  The day after writing this, I observed a teenager lapse into a massive seizure that went on well over 10 minutes — well beyond, that is, the threshold for dialing 911, getting the kid to the ER, and beginning to monitor for irreversible neurological damage.  The kid’s father rushed to the school where he told us that, having recently lost his job, the choice for his family was paying for the anti-seizure meds for one kid, or housing for all of them.

A society where any one person can pocket $12,006,675 in a year while there is even one other who cannot afford to control his child’s epilepsy is not a society where the rich are owed anything.  The “rights” to amass personal wealth, accumulate capital, or monopolize property can command no loyalty from ordinary men and women under these circumstances.

Where needs are not met, fortunes are immoral and intolerable.  Where needs are not met, wealth is to be forfeit, as are the proceeds of all criminal endeavor in any society.  This is axiomatic — not a matter for the least discussion, the least debate.

It would be altogether gratifying to see the rich squirm, to see them suffer well beyond the measure that the father of this young man suffered — and is suffering still at some hospital bedside, as bills mount that will probably pitch his family onto the streets anyway.  Do you really think I don’t get at least a little woody in the shorts when I see pictures like this?  

What that kind of gratification will not accomplish is the prefiguration the society in which needs will be met.  Until we have communities of wisdom, the communities of justice that temper our anger can only be communities of prefiguration.

Ethnic Cleansing 2.0

            Here is a new way that ethnic cleansing takes place:  By the eradication not just of human bodies, or the forced transfer of large populations, but also by letting people stay put while wiping out all small local differences in language, culture, foodways, and agricultural subsistence in the interests of capital.  See this article, which I interpret here to make some necessary subtexts more explicit.

            The story concerns the potential fate of local producers of cheese in an area of the Basque country in the Pyrenees.  The milk comes from a type of sheep called the latxa that has lived there for, well, forever.  The cheeses in question are the many varieties of Idiazabal cheese produced in the highlands of Guipuzcoa and eastern Navarre, as well as the Roncal cheese from northwestern Navarre.  These are, we are told, superb cheeses.

            The Basques, please recall, are a people who speak a linguistic isolate, which is to say, a language hat is not only unrelated to the Catalan, Castillian, French, or Occitan spoken around it, but is probably not even Indo-European.  This is the sort of thing nation-states — France, Spain — kill people to eradicate.  And the Basques have suffered plenty.

            Enter now a type of sheep called the assaf.  This thing came into the world when, starting in 1955, researchers of the Israeli Agricultural Research Organization started cross-breeding experiments.  It produces lots more milk than the latxa do, but at the cost of introducing into the Basque world another engine of its demise:

In the 1970′s a Spanish priest in Jerusalem took note of the qualities of this breed and imported an original flock of 500 lambs to Spain, where they were gradually adopted in Castilian farms. In large swathes of Castile, the assaf–or mixes of assaf with local breeds–have completely displaced the indigenous Castilian or churra sheep. Their requirements are consonant with the industrialization of rural production and the fencing of the old transhumant routes; they prosper in stables rather than grazing in the open, no need for shepherds, no need for seasonal migrations, with milk production occurring all year long. And with this industrial production comes the corresponding contamination and reliance on non-local feed. Moreover, if the milk of these foreign breeds is admitted, it will be nearly impossible for those who raise indigenous breeds to compete, and these breeds will in all likelihood be lost, as has already occurred with several of the indigenous Iberian breeds of cattle.

             Nothing outside of its grip can co-exist with the forces of capital.  Thus whereas once there were many family cheese-makers in the Idiazabal-making areas of the Aezkoa valley, now only two remain, and both are completely family run.  The work, which is continuous, provides just enough income to stay in business.  The choice of keeping the latxa breed alive, and resisting the assaf’s depredations, may spell the end of this type of cheese and of the independent life of the people of the valley.  Large assaf flocks will drive down the price of milk, ruin the quality of the cheese, drive the latxa breed to extinction, drag the valley out of a kind of self-subsistence and into a cash nexus involving expensive mass-produced inputs to maintain these assaf things, ruin the local environment — etc. etc. etc.

            The author of this piece, Maggie Schmitt, publishes a blog called the Gaza Kitchen.  On the one hand, this is a lovely gesture that sympathetically presents the story of ordinary women in the massive open-air prison (if not death camp) of the Gaza Strip as they struggle to feed their families.  She writes that

 we will also situate the cuisine in its context by exploring the lives of those who make these recipes and the sources of the ingredients they use.  This will provide us an opportunity to present a rich portrait of the social and cultural life of Gaza, as well as the dire situation of the Gazan economy under siege.  

Each dish is comprised of ingredients, and given the conflictive history of the Gaza Strip – particularly the present siege – each ingredient represents a story in itself.  Some come through the tunnels, some are permitted to pass through the Israeli borders (generally in response to an Israeli market surplus), and yet others are grown or raised in Gaza, always under extraordinary circumstances (bombing of chicken farms, razing of farmland, flooding of farms with wastewater, restriction of fishing…). 

            What is lacking, in the course of overpersonalizing these narratives, is the clear necessity to recognize through this project the degree to which Israel has reduced a formerly polyglot and pluricultural land into a monoculture created and sustained by violence.  There has never been a “Jewish state” in Palestine, only a place where Jews and (horror of horrors) bunches of non-Jews lived together.

            Thus the protagonist of one tale in this cookbook is described thus:

 Um Ramadan is a Palestinian refugee from Yafa, and married into a family of  fishermen from the same city.  She knows all the traditional Gazan and Yafawi ways of preparing seafood (prior to 1948, the Yafa was the closest major city to Gaza and travel and trade was fluid and continuous between the two; the cities also share many similar culinary traditions, including seafood). 

             Let’s keep our historical wits about us and recall that indigenous Palestinians from what is now called “Jaffa” [Ar. يَافَا‎]  did not end up in Gaza by coincidence.  The reason Um Ramadan is able to be an informant regarding Yafawi culture is that she and about 50,000 other people were driven out by European-born Zionist thugs in the ethnic cleansing of the city beginning on 13 May 1948.  (For an idea of the kind of rich, thriving, and ancient society that was eradicated in the act of creating the fiction of a Jewish monoculture, have a look here.)

            Those survivors of Yafa who reached Gaza mostly got there by boat — the Zionist fiction that “Arabs” will drive them into the sea perhaps originated as a fanciful and paranoid recasting of how the city of Yafa was ethnically cleansed.

            Let’s hope that the Gaza Kitchen project will be explicit in demonstrating the survival of a pluricultural society under constant threat of disappearance at the hands of monoculture.  This is not just a sad or perverse historical accident – it’s what capitalism is, and does, and intends to do when it is working properly. 

            We are all Gaza.  Or soon will be.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

            How do Americans observe Ramadan?  By jacking up the bigotry.  How else?  Thus, a “mosque” controversy contrived by some unhinged Lady Likudnik seeking a whirl on the wheel of Spectacle, and so forth.  Not real, not relevant, just a specimen of infotainment, an exemplar of the deployment of the product called Hatred as the only consumable good keeping the disaster called Capitalism from leaving the tracks today instead of tomorrow.

            Today (or tomorrow, depending on moon-sighting) Ramadan ends.  The feast that succeeds it is called Eid al-Fitr.  Your marching orders:

• Get informed about what this means, even if the best you can do is Wikipedia.
• Get a Muslim friend or neighbor.  (If you don’t have one, be ashamed at your insolent insularity.)
• Greet that person with the phrase “Eid Mubarak” or “Happy Eid.”  (Don’t worry about whether you said it correctly, because you won’t have.  The Arabic word عيد begins with a consonant unpronounceable to monolingual English speakers.  This does not let you off the hook.)
• Inquire sincerely about your friend’s family and their plans for the holiday.
• Do the same for your other friends and neighbors on days of significance to them. 

            This is nothing special, folks — just the elementary human courtesies that, in atomizing us and turning us from human beings into consumers, our current system has led us to forget.  As such, simple decency has been rendered an act of subversion.

            And one more thing:  Don’t fall for the inane logic of the President and his killers regarding “Burn a Koran Day.”  The flaw in that particular unit of Spectacle is simply this (in bullet points for easy tracking):

• US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are occupying forces.
• It is the explicit right of populations under occupation to resist the occupier.  It is no one’s right to invade and occupy other countries.
• Thus, attacks on occupying forces are inherently more legitimate than occupation itself.  If you send boys and girls in harm’s way, let alone under morally illegitimate circumstances, you cannot whine when they get hurt.
• It is inevitable that somebody is going to get hurt in Iraq and/or Afghanistan in the coming days, no matter what some gobshite crawthumper in Florida does or does not do.
• Burning Qur’ans is not a recruiting bonanza for al-Qaeda.  The massacre of civilians in places under completely unlawful military occupation is a recruiting bonanza.  And it happens every day, not only in occupied Afghanistan, but also in neighboring, unoccupied Pakistan, where pilotless drone aircraft operated from video-game consoles just outside the Magic Kingdom in Florida whack entire wedding parties with a single blow from a Hellfire missile.  (Following which their teenage operators, who should be in college instead, go home and unwind with a rousing session of Grand Theft Auto 2.)
• Blaming increasing resentment of, and legitimate armed resistance to, unlawful military occupations in Asia on some jack-asinine stunt in a part of Florida a little further north than the drone controllers’ base is perverse, cynical, and incoherent.

            That being said, burning Qur’ans is not a harmless thing.  The real problem, so far unremarked in the current paroxysm of groupthinking hate-speech, is how that hypothetical Muslim friend of yours will respond.  How hard do you want to make it for that person to live as a fully integrated member of American civil society?  Do you want to create new conditions under which, when you ring the bell to say Eid Mubarak, your Muslim neighbor will be too paranoid, fearful, or suspicious to answer the door?

            Maybe you don’t, but somebody does, because there’s big money in it.  It’s how the Spectacle works, and what it does best: 

1. Invent a fantasy fear out of nothing.
2. Make it utterly impossible for the object of that fantasy to behave in any way different from what the fantasy projects.
3. Announce, on some for-profit commercial media outlet, “See?  I told you so.”
4. Watch the revenue cascade into the broadcaster’s coffers.

            That’s the cycle:  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Red on Black

            Lots of genuinely atrocious things happened in January of 1934, and at least one thing that was truly wonderful.

            On 31 January 1934, readers of the Tampa Morning Tribune awoke to the headline “Gang Kills Negro After Taking Him From Officer.”  This apparently was far from being an isolated incident.  One gathers that the officer was rather more complicit than not in the horrors that ensued for said Negro.

            The Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill, proposing federal trials for any law enforcement officers who failed to exercise their responsibilities during a lynching incident, was proposed in January 1934.  This seems to have been timely enough, but President Roosevelt refused to speak out in favor of the bill.  He argued that the white voters in the South would never forgive him if he supported the bill and he would therefore lose the next election.  Which either says a great deal about Roosevelt’s integrity, or about the viciousness of the South.  Or both.

            In January 1934, a grand jury in Santa Clara County, California, refused to indict anyone for the double lynching of Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes.  These were the alleged murderers of Brooke Hart, heir to a department store fortune and considered one of the most desirable bachelors in California.  After the discovery of Hart’s body by duck hunters in San Francisco Bay, word was spread instantly throughout northern California, with radio stations announcing throughout the day that a lynching would take place in St. James Park across from the Santa Clara County Courthouse at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, November 26, 1933, four days before Thanksgiving.  The lynching was broadcast as a live event by a Los Angeles radio station, and an estimated 3,000 to 15,000 (other reports where 3,000-5,000) men, women, and children witnessed the event.  When newspaper published photos of the lynching, identifiable faces were deliberately smudged so that they remained anonymous.

            In January 1934, unemployment in the US decreased for the first time during the Great Depression, to 22%.

            Alcatraz became a prison.

            The Gold Reserve Act came into effect, outlawing most private possession of gold, and forcing individuals to sell it to the Treasury

            In January 1934, W. E. B. Du Bois published an editorial in The Crisis declaring that Negroes should simply face up to the fact that they would die under segregation, a heresy for which he was forced out of the leadership of the NAACP amid accusations of Marxist tendencies. 

            On one evening in Chicago in January 1934 a rather different scene unfolded, described by Randi Storch in Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928-1935 as follows:

Approximately six thousand Chicagoans gathered in the city’s large Coliseum Hall to celebrate and remember Lenin.  It was the kind of evening that brought out the complexities of Communism in the city.  “In behalf of the American Communist Party,” the main speaker declared, “I say that the one program which will bring unity to the American people is the program of Lenin.”  The audience included a contingent of five hundred children among the thousands of grown men and women, half of whom were African American and the other half of whom were a mixture of native-born whites and first- or second-generation immigrants from various ethnic communities.  They represented a number of occupations, including skilled and unskilled industrial workers, artists, intellectuals, and students.  In a sense, this occasion honoring Lenin’s memory had already begun the work of unifying American people across the lines of age, sex, ethnicity, and occupation. 

            One has to suppose that the rather different tableau of racial harmony evoked in a communist gathering, and repeated in many others like it, did not pass entirely unnoticed by those working in 1934 for racial justice.  The accusation of red sympathies leveled at Du Bois after his 1934 Crisis piece may not have been entirely justified at the time, but in fact Du Bois showed more than tendencies in this direction in later life, extending to overt membership in the party.  Shortly before his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., said of Du Bois:

We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life.  Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years.  [...]  In contemporary life, the English speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist, or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist.  It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist.  Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.  [...]  Dr. Du Bois’ greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice.

            Knowing what else was going on around him in January 1934, it may well be that Du Bois already knew full well that racist violence would always be a part of capitalist societies.  And it would still be well to imagine that “race” is not a thing in itself outside the commodity relation — such that a post-racist society must necessarily be a post-capitalist one.

Sixteen Thousand to One

            By one current estimate, the ration of Us to Them (in class war terms) exceeds 16,000 to 1.  Put slightly differently, if you are a worker for Big Pharma, your value is one-sixteen-thousandth that of the guy at the top.  Here’s how we know:

            Last year, Fred Hassan, former head of drugs company Schering-Plough, took home $49,700,000.  (Let’s not be ridiculous and say he “earned” this; personally I’d say he looted it, he stole the sweat and toil of others and called it a salary.)  This included a $33,000,000 golden parachute to get him to leave after the company merged with Merck.  And 16,000 people got fired as a direct result of the merger. 

            Now, if we got all 16,000 folks together, went to Fred’s house, and persuaded him (by any means necessary) to share the wealth, each of them could go home with about $3,000.  Not much compensation compared to a lost job — plus the mob would be slaughtered by the police and pilloried on Fox News.  Can’t be done.

            On the other hand, what if you got 16,000 people to combine their interests, skills, and talents for a self-reliant community where real needs are met?  What if this community had its $49,700,000 back as funds to get itself started?  The money belongs to these people after all, not to Fred.

            Basic fact:  You are worth more fired.  And as long as that is true, you are fucked.  We now know that slash-and-burn business pays big.  Bosses of the 50 US companies that sacked the most staff during the current recession earned 42% more than their peers.  These people collectively eliminated 531,363 jobs — over half a million tossed in the tip, consigned to all the horrors of unemployment.  And collectively, the 50 criminal CEOs who did this took home $598,000,000.  For the companies employing these guys, profits increased on average by 44% — during this recession.

            So:  You are nothing.  You are, indeed, less than nothing.  Your family, too.  You are held by the class enemy in about the same regard as they hold shit, unless the shit contains money.  The instant there is one penny more to be made to boost corporate earning and bloat management paychecks by firing you, you will be fired.  There is sweet fuck-all to protect you against this.  That’s capitalism in a nutshell.

            Median CEO pay is currently $8,500,000 per year.  This is 263 times greater than the pay of the average worker in the same firms.  And more than 10% of the workforce is now unemployed.

            Marx highlighted the importance of the “reserve army” of unemployed workers to capitalism.  The unemployed experience crisis; the bosses don’t, either immediately nor in the long run.  That’s because a lay-off will almost certainly reduce your wage in your next job, as well as your lifetime earnings potential.  In Canada at least, 60% of workers laid off between 2002-06 took a pay cut in their next job, in the majority of cases by more than 20%.

            We also know that losing a job increases the risk of a person’s mortality by 15-20% in the following 20 years.  In other words, for someone laid off at age 40, the cost can be 1.5 years of life.  Not surprising when you consider the results of  a study finding that, in Florida, the average cost of continuing health insurance under a COBRA is 102.2% of the average unemployment benefit.

            This naturally has a social cost.  That cost, incurred by the former employer, is born by the worker and, possibly, the rest of society — certainly not by the offending company.  That’s called an externalized cost, i.e., a cost the company incurred that someone else has to pay.  (There are lots of such externalized costs — consider, for instance, global warming.)

            You are worth nothing.  Nothing.  If you haven’t read the pertinent section of the IWW Preamble lately, it’s time to refresh your memory:

THE WORKING CLASS AND THE EMPLOYING CLASS

HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON

What is Autonomist Marxism? Part II

from Harry Cleaver’s introduction to Antonio Negri’s classic, Marx Beyond Marx

            For those of us who share Negri’s commitment to the constant renewal of revolutionary practice, we can focus on those elements of Marx that inform the analysis of our own struggles.  Several generations of Marxists have given us the habit of perceiving the mechanisms of domination.  What we need now is to use Marx to help us discover the mechanisms of liberation.

            The fascination of Marxists with capitalist mechanisms of despotism in the factory, of cultural domination and of the instrumentalization of working-class struggle has blinded them to the presence of a truly antagonistic subject.  The capitalist class is the only subject they recognize.  When they do see working-class struggle, it is almost always treated as a derivative of capital’s own development.  The true dynamic of capitalist development is invariably located in such “internal” contradictions among capitalists as competition.

            Negri’s reading of the Grundrisse is designed to teach — or to remind — that there have always been not one, but two subjects in the history of capitalism.  He argues that what we observe is a growing tension between capital’s dialectic and an antagonistic working-class logic of separation. 

            The dialectic is not some metaphysical law of cosmological development.  It is rather the form within which capital seeks to bind working class struggle.  In other words, when capital succeeds in harnessing working class subjectivity to the yoke of capitalist development, it has imposed the contradictory unity of a dialectical relation.  But to bind working class struggle, to impose a unity, means that capital must overcome this other subject — the working class — that moves and develops with its own separate logic.  This logic, Negri argues, is a non-dialectical one.  It is a logic of antagonism, of separation, that characterizes a class seeking not to control another, but to destroy it in order to free itself. 

            Two different logics for two different and opposed classes.  Two subjects, locked together by the power of the one to dominate the other, but never the less two historical subjects, each with the power to act, to seize the initiative in the class struggle.  Negri shows that Marx saw clearly how the historical development of capitalist society has always involved the development of the working class as a separate and antagonistic subject — a subject which develops the power to throw the system into crisis and to destroy it.

            From the point of view of the developing working-class subject, capitalist hegemony is at best a tenuous, momentary control that is broken again and again by workers’ struggle.  We should not confuse the fact that capitalists have, so far, been able to regain control with the concept of an unchallengeable hegemony.  In a world of two antagonistic subjects, the only objectivity is the outcome of their conflicts.

            In the development of this clash of subjectivities the continual development of the working class from dominated labor power to revolutionary class (a growth in the relative strength of the working class vector) increasingly undermines capitalist control and imposes its own directions on social development.  Because of this, competition among capitalists is less a driving force and more what Negri calls “sordid family quarrels” over which managers are at best imposing discipline on the working class.

            It is this analysis of working class subjectivity that infuses Negri’s work with immediate relevance to those in struggle.  In this period when capital is trying to wield fiscal and monetary policy as weapons against the working class, Negri’s analysis helps us see that capitalist crisis is always a crisis in its ability to control the working class.

            Capitalist power over labor — at the social level, money — is the ability to force people into the labor market, to force people to work for capital in production, and to coerce surplus labor in the labor process, and to control the exchange between labor and capital so that profits (surplus labor) are increased.

            As Negri points out, Marx is keenly aware that capital’s power to extort surplus labor is a power exerted over an “other” whose own active subjectivity must be harnessed to capital’s designs.  Marx explored this subjectivity and saw that it fought the primitive accumulation of the classes: the forced creation of the labor market and the forced submission of people to the lives of workers.  He explored this subjectivity and saw that it struggles against being forced to work.

            Although he paints a true horror story of living labor being dominated by capitalist-controlled dead labor, Marx also makes clear that living labor cannot be killed off totally or capital itself would die.  The irony of capitalist reproduction is that it must assure the continued reproduction of the living subject.  The antagonism is recreated on higher and higher levels as capital develops.  What begins as the horror of zombie-like dead labor being summoned against living labor, becomes, over time, an increasingly desperate attempt by capital to protect its own existence against an ever-more-powerful-and-hostile working class. 

            Capital can never win, totally, once and forever.  It must tolerate the continued existence of an alien subjectivity which constantly threatens to destroy it.  What a vision: capital, living in everlasting fear of losing control over the hostile class it has brought into existence!  This is the peacefully placid capitalist hegemony of traditional Marxism turned inside out, become a nightmare for the ruling class.