What’s the fastest way to break up a party? Put on a Noam Chomsky CD.
Category: Politics
Review of "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life"
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter was the 1964 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction and illuminates American historical responses to issues of intellectualism. Rather than being a sustained examination of a particular period, Hofstadter instead writes on issues that have particular significance in a time after Joseph McCarthy has died but his legacy still had legs.
Intellectualism does not have a specific ideological composition but is determined by specific habits and attitudes, most typically defined as a mindset that takes joy in depth analysis. Genteel, ante-bellum southern intellectuals lamenting an advancing industrialism’s degenerative social effects on a once agrarian economy are thus as much intellectuals as the socialist writers at The Masses in the Lower East Side. Intellectualism (and intellectuals) are defined in contradistinction to intelligence which is viewed as inherited, traditional manners of analysis that only concerns itself with the practical. Hofstadter’s distinctions between those that are in the professional, white-collar classes and intellectuals is also noteworthy. He points out that an advanced education, say leading one to be a member of a legal profession, doesn’t necessarily make one an intellectual as this is just technical training. Intellectuals devote their free time to personal edification and wrestling with problems however they are not, according to Hofstadter, allowed to become devotees to any particular idea. I am somewhat ambivalent about this aspect of intellectualism as it seems to give the credence to the idea that – using Hofstader example – that anyone staking a solid position aren’t intellectuals but fanatics. I think that capriciousness is definitely an aspect of intellectualism, but I think to disregard those that stake out a position (that may be informed by contrasting views!) continues some of the anti-intellectualist McCarthite legacy that he seeks to throw in disrepute.
One of the first and most oft recurring themes Hofstadter identifies in American consideration of intellectualism is this conflict between conservative and religious groups to liberal political philosophy. For the former, intellectualism is dangerous as it’s quest, to paraphrase Marx, for a ruthless criticism of all things existing without fear as to where the conclusion will lead is disruptive to existing social fabrics. Their overriding antagonism stems from what they perceive as a lack of moral foundations in intellectualism. Such a sentiment does not, however, come ex nihilo and Hofstadter shows how this is closely tied to the early settler conditions, low levels of formative education, foreign immigration, revivalist preachers and resistance to foreign religious institutions like the Catholic diocese and Anglican church. One Georgia pastor states that there are only three books that should be read by people, the Bible, the hymn book and an almanac, as anything else will turn people “bad”.
For the politically conservative, intellectuals were weak-willed, effeminate intellectuals. They had book knowledge, but not knowledge of “how people are.” They were good at thinking, but not at doing. They were too quick to experiment with new solutions to social problems and not let the time honored traditional way of dealing with things work. As a force in electoral politics, Hofstadter shows how this first manifested in the Federalist and anti-Federalist debates with Jefferson playing the role of an intellectual devil inspired by too much French philosophy. Connected to the myriad slurs both sides produced about each other are concerns about the increasingly depersonalized nature of government that are still voiced today. The growth of a professional governmental bureaucracy and their role in establishing and perpetuating norms played on the anxieties of a recently “free” people that were afraid of a return to despotism. Most interesting in this period of anti-intellectualism is that as mass consumer culture increased, the native intellectuals – the “gentleman of good breeding” – soon left politics as they were yelled down by a new group who had no qualms about making barker-like appeals to emotions.
The political classes were not alone in their fear of intellectual, the small-holdings farmer often contributed his own perspective to the situation. At a time when America was largely agricultural, the small-farmers resisted the knowledge attempted to be brought to them by the universities. This was both as they resented the expert who had, at least in their mind, not put in the same sort of manual labour dues as to be called a farmer and as the large amount of cheap land made speculation on prices more profitable than working on it. This mistrust of the outside “intellectual” makes it’s way over into the labor unions as well. Samuel Gompers was notorious in his disdain for “idea men” and actively sought to emulate the values of the possessing classes. He actively fought against and decried the large number of socialists, communists and syndicalists which sought to turn the union into a larger instrument of social regeneration and instead propounded the bread and butter policies that would eventually become business unionism.
All of these social pressures could not, however, counter the power given to intellectuals during the period leading up to the New Deal. As the status quo become an untenable one, it had a tremendously revivifying effect for those intellectual specialists previously marginalized into small academic spheres. Now their proclamations were, at least in part, being seriously considering as being “the gospel” of how to proceed. The political and social institutions that were set up according to their outlines was not without nay-sayers, and often times the final result was a shell of the original plan, however once university professors and scientists came to play a role in the hall of power it was impossible to take them back. Hofstadter shows how one of the major driving sources of antagonism stemmed from businessmen combating the intellectualist attempts to insulate people form the vicissitudes of the market economy by supporting workers movements for greater on the job safety and general economic planning.
In the section on schooling, the anti-intellectualist animosity takes on the flavor of “life adjustment.” Here classes on how to master mundane tasks and how to develop one’s emotional intelligence are seen as preferable to classics and modern novels. While there is not the sort of depth into the reforms of Horace Mann and the conditions of teachers as I expect Dana Goldstein will be going into in when her book is published, the brief history of schools at the beginning of the 20th century shows the many deficiencies that would make today’s nay-sayer on the state of public education go into shock. For instance, it was an almost common practice for school masters to be Shang-Hai’d into the position and teachers to frequently leave without warning. This is understandable as their pay was so low and social regard for teachers differed drastically from the traditional Europeans recognition of them as having an important role. One of the aspects that I found to be somewhat surprising was Hofstadder’s silence in regards to the Modern School movement’s origin from libertarian, not liberal, traditions. The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States by Paul Avrich is clear in illustrating how much of the educational concept and theories which later came to form discourses on teacher-child relations and pedagogy in fact originated from Spain. The later philosophical contributions of John Dewey, while politically at odds with the Spanish anarchists, has several significant overlaps including their similar views that schools are society inchoate, that book learning isn’t as valuable as being well-rounded, that a spirit of social service ought to be instilled within the co-operative structure of the classroom. I would attribute these as stemming from Dewey’s debt to Hegel, especially as Hofstadter states that Dewey’s writing is so vague that it caused his supporters to form into different camps based upon their interpretation and that the high level of abstraction which he wrote often made it problematic to turn his pronouncements into policy.
The closing considerations on the then current place of the American intellectual is primarily on the relationship between intellectuals and political power. Using a series of articles published in The Parisian Review as a point from which to discuss the changes in alienation felt by those on the social-democratic left, intellectuals are here shown as splitting between those that are able to accommodate themselves to the needs of power and those that resist it. Hofstadter doesn’t claim that these are the only two roles possible, but sees them as existing on a continuum tending to the extremes. While not tarrying with it here, I think it would have been worthwhile to then analyze the claims of the Left intellectuals more. As a social democrat he seems to be sympathetic to them, and it makes me wonder what he would now think of human terrain teams, but like stakes a positions that is the very self-same definition of intellectualism he gave earlier – ambivalence.
While I don’t think that some of the trends which Hofstadter comments on, such as the business world’s ambivalence to math and science continue per se, it does take on a different form. Rather than supporting community schools, the current trend towards supporting privatization is anti-intellectual in that it is part of a broader movement to undo the welfare state. The increased availability to use foreign-born specialists in this post-industrial atmosphere allow for an intellectual environment that is increasingly without defender. Intelligence, yes, but even then only with limits.
A brief on the political aesthetics of "Step Up: Revolution"
The newest film in the Step Up franchise, Step Up: Revolution piqued my interest as one of the writing projects I’m currently working on concerns the depiction of political radicals in American cinema during this, the post-Soviet epoch. The first two films in the series addressed issues of class in a facile way but generally progressive way: mutual love of dance and sexual attraction are able to unite people with vast differences in social standing to winning a contest. This installment keeps the poor boy meets and falls in love with a rich girl narrative framework, here the stakes towards which they unite are much higher. In this film the class element in the Step Up series refers not just to the notion of “stepping up” to win a place in a dance company or a street contest but also refers to issues of social mobility. The final goal which unites the two lovers, Ryan and Emily, is to keep capitalist gentrifiers from taking over a working class neighborhood in Miami and the means by which they attempt to do this is organized, direct action.
To say that the dancers in the film are socialists would be an overstatement. The initial organizing impetus for the dance troupe and production team known as “The Mob” is to win a YouTube contest rewarding money to whichever group can get 10 million views on their channel. While this is incentive, we learn from the group’s co-founder Sean that they are more interested in having “a voice” and we see through their action a socialist mode of political subjectivity that becomes framed in such a way that they become populist heroes fighting against capitalism.
One of the most visible ways we see the groups anti-capitalistic core is where the group practices. Taking no heed to property laws that make trespassing illegal even in areas not used by their owners, The Mob practices in one of Miami’s many unoccupied or partially constructed buildings. Additionally the similarity between the name “The Mob” and “The Masses,” the early 20th century American socialist politics monthly, is noteworthy. While it’s unlikely that the authors planned this, it is yet another of many qualitative overlaps with socialist organizations. Furthermore the idea of a dance troupe being a revolutionary avant-garde is evocative of more early 20th century radical history, this time in the form of anarchist Emma Goldman’s famous quote: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
As Sean introduces Emily to members of “The Mob” we see that the group is an approximation of a good model for an international socialist organization. For one, thanks to the ethnic population of South Florida, the membership is truly international in origin. Secondarily, we see a skilled division of labor amongst the group to maximize the efficiency of their production. Additionally we see that the dancers, like good socialists, are not prone to the vices of excessive drinking or smoking as it keeps them from being able to perform their labor of love. Whether or not they have to abide by a “Points of Discipline for Party Members” would be purely conjectural, but it is worth noting the difference between this group and that found in The Anarchist Cookbook. While the message the group puts out may be ambiguous, at least as Sean’s voiceover narrates, “When the Mob speaks, everyone listens.” Though not at first explicitly political, as the group develops they receive positive, populist expressions of sympathy and solidarity as a result of their actions, which would presumably lead to greater community involvement. Finally, we see that The Mob’s joy is dangerous. In the opening dance scene they stop traffic outside of Ocean Drive, Miami’s upscale shopping area, and the one following they invade SoHo Studios, one of the more famous Wynwood art galleries. In the first case normal business activity is interrupted by spectacle while in the other the hallowed halls of culture are briefly occupied, alluding to practice outlined by anti-capitalist, Situationist theorist Guy Debord.
After Emily has been told by her perspective Wynwood dance company leader that she needs to be more unique, seeing this dance performance, and reading the note that “Sometimes you need to break the rules” given to her by Sean that she decides to try to join The Mob. Emily is immediately given the role of lead dancer.
Following the revelation that a developer, who happens to be Emily’s father, wants to buy up local businesses and homes from renters the group diverges from it’s initial plans for “be heard” and becomes something of a proper socialist undertaking that instead wants “to be listened to”. While previously The Mob’s events were for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, they decide they want to try to protect their neighborhood from capitalist investment.
While terse and lacking theoretical depth, the dialogue following this revelation could be taken from socialist debates on the nature of art. While I doubt that Duane Adler and Amanda Brody, the authors of the script, bothered to research this it doesn’t take away from the substance. After Sean and Emily learn of her father plans to purchase and redevelop the working-class waterfront area she proceeds to exercise directive control of the group their her revolutionary exhortations:
“You’ve got four million viewers but you’re not saying anything that actually matters. It’s not ok to make art for fun anymore.”
“What are you proposing?”
“Enough with performance art, it’s time for protest art.”
Following this decision the group decides to “mob” the planning meeting that decides the fate of the projected gentrification area. After stopping the meeting by pulling a fire alarm, the group dances in hats and business attire. Reading direct messages into their dance is the beyond the realm of my interpretive powers, however it is worth noting that one of the sampled songs in the quasi dub-step song the DJ stitches together is by the notoriously anti-corporate musical group Radiohead. The grand finale of this particular Mob dance production? A giant metal sculpture of an executive holding a briefcase that opens and has spray-painted on the inside: “We are not for sale.”
While Trip, developer Bill Anderson’s protege, is undaunted by this performance the Mob is awash with pride as now they have achieved the national recognition they so badly wanted as the YouTube video of the performance is viewed by millions. The wave of euphoria is short-lived. Eddie discovers Emily’s real identity and decides to have an “mob” performance without Ryan’s authorization. This performance, at a private banquet, results in arrests and the group’s expulsion from the contest. Emily upbraids them both for the stunt that outed her as an anti-capitalist sympathizer and activist to her Dad. However she soon realizes the Ryan had nothing to do with it and her just formed sentiments against the group are reversed, leading her to greater resolve to halt the gentrification process.
The Mob unites despite the attempte
d (Stalinst?) grab at leadership, and the film closes with the capitalist developer Bill Anderson taking a paternalist role to enhance and develop the community that already exists rather than kicking them out for a richer group of tenants. The new goal of the group accomplished, the leads kiss.
While it would be acceptable for the film to end here, it’s not. The Mob faces one last test of their “socialist” identity and fails. Given the opportunity to work as part of a promotion team for Nike, The Mob immediately assents to the offer and thus becomes commodified. This isn’t surprising as the dance team was never truly socialist in orientation, but that a group that had just fought so hard for the working class would so quickly and happily join forces with an trans-national corporation widely known for it’s child labor and incredibly pay is telling – not of the group itself but the relations which produced it.
Review of "Explosion in a Cathedral"
Alejo Carpentier’s book Explosion in a Cathedral has the distinction of being amongst Lolita and several of Henry Miller’s novels as books which have required me to reference the dictionary in search of rarely used words. It is in these terms for shipping that the layman doesn’t know and in architecture and science terms of the time as well as the gothic descriptions of surroundings that causes this book to be seen as one of the ur-text’s of Latin American magical realism. Set in the island of Guadeloupe during the time of the French Revolution, the novel’s main characters are three wealthy orphans, the siblings Sofia and Carlo and their sickly cousin Esteban, and the adult Victor Hugues. While the youths are fictional, Victor was in fact a historical personage who was the French Revolutionary government’s military leader of the assault to retake the island of Guadeloupe from the British and later Governor of various French holdings in the Carribean.
The novel begins “I saw them erect the guillotine again to-night” and then follows by telling of the death of the family patriarch. The children isolate themselves from the local community and begin purchasing through catalogs the newest literature, scientific instruments and fine arts that they can fit into their house. They amuse themselves with games of the imagination and experiments with the scientific equipment until Victor comes knocking at the door, bringing with him all of the conflict present in this age of Atlantic revolutions. We quickly learn that though a businessman, Victor idealizes the classical Republican conception of virtue. This aspect of Victor’s can be seen in his quotations of Roman orators while playing pretend with the children as well as his stated manner of identifying his motivations as stemming not from private interests that causes him to profit off of others, but from a notion of universal brotherhood. Such a set of beliefs at such a time sets him in league with a number of interesting characters who make brief appearances amidst the turmoil which soon commences. Voodoo doctors with Masonic ties, and a corrupt Catholic executor of the dead father’s estate are just two examples of the island population. In his characterization and description, Carpentier is deft in showing that each of these characters are not simply representatives of fundamental energies of the age but are also individuals. Through this stylization, he is able to illustrate the social complexities of the global system in a very personal manner.
The play that characterizes Victor’s first appearance in the orphans house soon vanishes as rumors strike upon their idyllic shore that those involved in the Masonic lodges may soon be expelled from the French dominions. Forced to choose between abandoning their new friend and going with him and his black, voodoo practicing associate Oge, they leave and begin an adventure that will cause them to be separated for years and mature in ways that they never thought possible. The characters rich internal life that is shown to be constantly at odds with the situations in which they find themselves. For instance Esteban finds himself trying to navigate the dangerous position of being a Guadeloupean working for the French on the border of Spain with Revolutionary sympathies for the party that has just been ousted in the Thermidorean reaction. Though he has been nothing but felicitous to their cause, as he sees the heads start to roll from Paris outward and surveys the task he’s been assigned as impossible, his beliefs are sorely questioned. Sofia, though loyal to the rhetoric that Victor embodies, abhors the violence that comes with it’s ascent and is empathetic with the Africans who now no longer slaves are forced into capitalist market relations with a mother country that has brought them naught but suffering and compulsive labor.
Timothy Brennan suggests in his introduction to the novel that the book was a prescient defense of the Cuban revolution’s values, an interpretation that I agree with. Unlike, the novels by Rizal that I reviewed earlier, as the above should suggest the novel succeeds not only as a thinly veiled defense of Cuba’s new political powers but as an aesthetic work itself. As a defense of the revolution, it constructs the framework of the conflict impelling the youths out of the comforts of their home as originating amongst foreign powers vying for control of islands viewed as little more that rebellious forced labour populations. Lacking the industrial goods and capacity, the population, history of armed self-defense on the scale with which foreign powers could bring to bear upon them – the island of Guadeloupe and the others around it are de facto tributary vassal states. Such a terrain of complex relationships is not something that is not merely described but narrated, to use a distinction made by Georg Lukacs, in such as way that shows the deep historical research that Carpentier put into the book. One of the issues that I have with Brennan’s interpretation in the introduction is his conception of Sofia as the “only positive character” by citing an interview where Carpentier says that she represents praxis. Praxis understood via Marxist categories is something that is broad and applies to all individual and groups actions that are based upon their beliefs and material situatedness. As such she is not the only positive character. Victor is as well, though in his role of cleansing the inherited oppressions and inhumanity by using those same tools he is deeply alienated. Sofia, from the Greek word signifying wisdom, however sees this as both necessary AND horrible and thus represents the second stage of the transition to a new society.
Also worth mentioning is that in addition to the historically veiled defense of the revolution, the book is also a call to the intellectuals of the period to remove themselves from the confines of their houses and studies, which the children were once in, in order to take an active role in the management and direction of the newly created polity, as Esteban and Sofia do. Victor, a charismatic leader, is the point of convergence for Esteban and Sofia’s respective sentiments of admiration and romance and alludes to the many historical circumstances where intellectuals have rallied around an energetic leader that seeks to level the inherited norms to make way for greater material progress.
One of the methods that I have for a novelists in determining how good a book is if after reading it it makes me want to read their other works, in this case it’s a resounding yes and as soon as I make my way through the other books I have on my list I’ll definitely make an effort to pick up Carpentier’s other renowned novel
The Kingdom of This World.
Review of "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right"
My sense of irony compelled me to read Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Anne C. Heller after having just finished Marx’s biography. Especially considering that both of these thinkers have an upsurge in their popular reference in discussions on the current state of the economy, I think it’s not just amusing but fitting. I’d read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead a few years ago and found myself impressed and underwhelmed. Impressed at the creation of true heroes without some sort of existential angst, the self-help aspects inserted amongst Rand’s prose and defining her characters as well as her ability to tightly plot a novel of ideas such that it wasn’t completely boring, but also critical due to it’s highfalutin style, one dimensional characters, and the dangerous potential for readers to deploy a mimetic adoption of a character’s qualities via worship of them without incorporating a properly developed critical, historical consciousness. Thus while I am empathetic to Whitaker Chamber’s review of Rand, I also see several positive aspects worthy of recuperation.
Heller’s biography of Rand starts by immediately peeling back the aura of mysticism around her philosophy. Attending to her early childhood, we learn Rand experienced similar dynamics as other Russian exiles, such as Vladimir Nabokov, that led them to rail against the system of social relations in Russia following the end of the civil war once they’d moved to America. The privations created by civil war and the repressive political environment it created, crop failure, brain drain, trade embargoes and experimentations in production processes led those who fled to holistically decry the new Soviet state. This position is completely understandable: When market forces aren’t abstracted into an invisible force and cited as the justification for the behavior of police agents upholding “property laws” but are instead decided by a centralized planning authority and it’s agents one comes to resent the government for causing shifts in relations that lowers one’s status. This aspect of Rand’s history in Russia is then expanded by examining her first forays into philosophy. By quoting her notebooks, we see an early Rand who was wrestling with Nietzsche’s celebration of the aristocratic – something that a highly cultured, intelligent, secular Jewess with upper class upbringing would have easily identified with. It’s also worth noting that during her time enrolled in university in Russia she was given an elementary education in Marxism, reading such works as The ABC of Communism and found the logic of Aristotle to be particularly attractive (in fact “A is A”, a logical presupposition popularized by Aristotle, would later be the name of a directory for Objectivist oriented projects). Also in Russia we see Rand, like so many other people across the globe following the second world war, absolutely enthralled by Hollywood cinema. She watches them and loving them so much considers going to Film School, but knowing that this would mean she would create Soviet propaganda, decides to escape to the USA via an educational visa and then breaks ties with her family.
Once Rand makes her way to L.A. after a brief stay with distant family relatives, she reads Nietzsche more and begins writing using many of the the themes founds in his writings, even attempting to adopt his aphoristic style. She gets film work by being in the right place at the write time and soon starts to see “pinks” and “reds” everywhere and decides that it is of the utmost importance that the United States doesn’t go down the collectivist path of Russia and so writes and donates her time to fight this. It is this activism that starts to expand her view, albeit slightly, in the realm of political economy and more so in the way of America in general. Rand, in contact with several prominent intellectuals, is shown to repeating a similar process throughout her professional life. At first a connection is made between points upon which Rand and this other person agrees, Rand then goes through an almost Socratic like process of finding out their “premises” and then berating the other person each time theirs differs from hers, even if in the end they are at a similar position, and then tries to show them how they should adopt her position wholesale. This is the case both with her friends, such as Isabel Paterson, her “false friends” (conservatives that used the rhetoric of altruism or pragmatism to justify their positions) such as F. A. Hayek, and the people whom she wanted intellectual recognition from such as Sidney Hook. Indeed to a large part the biography is a retelling of two major themes: how she personally kept pushing people away from here that were able to intellectually match her and keeping around orbit younger people that were more open to her influence and how she would get involved in an organization and due to one issue or another denounce it as insufficiently “reactionary”, a term she used with positive valuation as she saw those that would restrain capitalism, the ideal economic system, as evil people.
One of the biography’s more interesting revelations to me, which speaks to this very process of alienation, was the fact that Ayn Rand was addicted to benzedrine. While the amphetamine was prescribed to her, Heller shows how it was this drug that fueled her late night discussion sessions, gave her the energy to write sometimes for over 12 hours at a time, kept her thin, and assisted in her habituation to a two pack of cigarettes a day habit (which according to Rand wasn’t unhealthy as the doctors weren’t trustworthy as they used statistics to provide their evidence, a fact that Rand’s lungs must not have been aware of as she died of cancer). I find this especially interesting given this similarity between her and Sartre, who she despised and who also ruined his health with uppers while writing Critique of Dialectical Reason at the time as Rand was ruining hers writing Atlas Shrugged. This clearly had a role in intensifying Rand’s negative personal characteristics, but also assisted her when she held court amongst her disciples once she decided to turn her own though into a school as the universities weren’t giving it sufficient attention.
Once Rand has finished her fiction and she devotes her time solely to essays, she also focuses solely on maintaining the apparatuses that she helped build with Nathaniel Branden. Thankfully Heller devotes only a small part of the book to their affair, pointing those interested to the autobiographical exposes, and does most of her writing on how the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) formed into it’s very own cultural grouping of likeminded people that would socialize almost exclusively with other Objectivists and would study Rand’s works and Leonard Peikoff’s and Branden’s exegesis of them. Clearly placing these groups within the milieu of the 60’s and 70’s and showing their evolution following the dissolution of the NBI amidst the schism caused amongst her inner circle following Rand’s discovery that Nathan had been involved with someone else other than her for four years is where Heller truly shines.
As a historian of the American conservative movement, she is able to deftly chart some of the influence of the Objectivists and show their populist appeal despite “trad”, traditional, conservatives disdain for their atheistic appeal to human rights. She shows how the Volker Fund paid for economics professors to get teaching positions at universities expire their marginalization from the profession, a fact under reported in my conversations with others about Von Mises or Hayek, and how it was the Koch brothers who created the Cato Institute on principles charted by Rand. Rand’s role as inspirer for the creation of the Libertarian Party is acknowledged, as is the wealth of student activism and publications against various policies such as the draft, drug laws and taxes. Young Americans for Freedom and Students for Individual Liberty are cited as prominent outlets of Objectivists related activism and it is her reaction and attempts at “reigning in” those that were inspired by her that she loses them. The anarcho-capitalist versus minarchist state positions controversy are outlined here as well, though it would have been to the benefit of the book to go into more detail on this considering this is a debate that continues to have relevance amongst libertarians today.
At the end of her life Heller shows Rand largely discredited amongst her early followers as her personal character alienated them and her pronouncements on morality had moved from the daily interactions to commentary on the world-historical. Lacking the background to make such judgements, many made fun of or rightly decried her racist or genocidal positions that she deemed as moral (for instance her claim that the Native American’s received what they deserved as they had no private property). Indeed this was at a time when Libertarianism was gaining the intellectual recognition that Rand would have loved. Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia and won the National Book Award for it in 1975 while Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976. By the end of the biography we can clearly see why Rand continues to get cited in American politics today as a person of inspiration, but also why those who uncritically laud her should be someone to watch out for.
Barcelona's Civil War History App Now Available!
The content that I made for GPS-My-City is a 18-stop GPS tour map with a history of each location in text and voice recording. It’s almost like having me give you a guided tour of the sites historically relevant to the Spanish Civil War.
In order to purchase it, first download the GPS-My-City App from the iTunes AppStore. Then search for the Barcelona Civil War tour from the in-app catalog.
A Civil Rights History Tour of New York City will be also up in the next three months!
Teachers Union/Student Protests and Vaga
Yesterday a student and teachers union led manifestacio at the University of Barcelona to protest the neoliberal cuts planned by the current Popular Party government ended with street battles and arson. Estimates of the crowd size from the organizers were between one hundred thousand and one hundred and twenty five thousand, however I’ve read now at several places that it was more likely around forty thousand. Several groups of radicals at the protest were not solely directed against the government cuts but against the Populist Party government itself as it emerged from the same coalition which once brought about the Francoist dictatorship and represents to many a step back for freedom in the country.
While this was going on, I was in my Spanish language school getting texts of about it from Josselyn, who was there. I was admittedly nonchalant about it as manifestacios happen here with such regularity that it seems a normal event. Placa Catalunya is filled almost every weekend with protestors from the CGT, the CCOO, Los Indignatos or some other post-leftist group. As I was bored with the routine of the protests here, I decided to go home rather than join Josselyn and her friends as I wanted to finish creating the content for a Radical History Tour of New York that I’m working on for GPS-My-City.com after having written a similarly inspired one for Barcelona that focuses on the Civil War epoch. As I was looking up addresses and GPS coordinates, Josselyn came in to our apartment out of breath and shared with me what was happening.
Apparently at one point during the manifestacio, groups of students broke into the school in order to occupy the dean’s office – as of now 300 students are sleeping inside the office of the rectorate while groups of anarchists started setting fire to the large plastic trash bins outside of the school, destroying a car next to one of them in the process. After doing this they called over a bull horn for people to go to Placa Espanya in order to disrupt the Mobile World Congress and destroy the tents and equipment set up there.
Up to now the buses and metros were already shut down to prevent quick movement of masses of people from other areas going to Placa Universitat or Placa Espanya, but with the beginning of arson the phone services were halted as well to stop communication between affinity groups from sharing information as to where police round up and defense points were located. As the police were now assaulting people at random with their batons and arresting anyone who couldn’t escape their clutches, Josselyn left with her friend Lawrence by bike. She arrived home, described what I just did above and, as we are a mere five blocks from where the group was headed, we then decided to see what would happen.
When we arrived at Placa Espana the street was already shut down and there were already over thirty armored personal carriers and around a hundred and fifty police in riot gear. They had just exited their cars and setting up a perimeter around the event. From our vantage point on the other side of where the protestors were coming from we couldn’t see what was happening very well, so we crossed the street and climbed onto the monument in the center of Placa Espana. Now some ten feet above ground, we saw that the number that had once been at Placa Universitat was now a fraction of what it was – there were now no more than eight hundred protestors. I scanned the crowd and saw the typical composition of Barcelona’s “radicals”. 
There was someone swinging around a flag with an anarchy insignia, someone with an Anonymous mask, large number of semi-dreadlocked youth (I say semi-dreadlocked as unlike anywhere I’ve seen before, large numbers of Catalan youths have dreadlocks solely on the back of their head) and many people that seemed to want to confront the police but knew that they stood no match for them in their riot gear.
After a while it was clear that there was not going to be any confrontation between the police and protestors outside of pithy perorations so we decided to walk around the protestors in order to get to the University of Barcelona. By this time the people that had once filled the square were gone, leaving behind only slogans in graffiti on various surfaces, the burnt remains of the trash and a few broken windows.
The other part of the Vaga action, shutting down La Bolsa bank was more successful. In addition to vandalizing the ATM screen with spray paint and ripping out the presspad, the group managed to break some of the windows with rocks. As we walked, I noticed a young man with a short red Mohawk bleeding from the arm while talking to police – presumably as he’d been arrested there instead of with the three-hundred others at the University of Barcelona.
The student action of entering the school and occupying it was also successful and as of now there are 300 students sleeping inside the office of the rectorate of the University of Barcelona. However what exactly this and the temporary shut down of the Bolsa bank has accomplished on a larger scale, is uncertain.
Photos not from Placa Espana are from Miquel Monfort and if you want to see more there is a great photoblog from MSNBC here.
For more info on the struggles over University, in Catalan, go to this blog or this one.
Review of "Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition"
In Howard Botwinick’s Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition, the author seeks to provide an outline of the factors going into wage labor that Marx meant to include in Das Kapital but never completed. This book is important as it is not simply a restatement of imperfect competition theories, but in it’s comparative analysis of other explanations of wage pricing. As Botwinick states in the opening, the ways in which patterns of wage disparity manifest themselves is important as an explanatory function for the ways that similar jobs in different companies get different wages as well as the persistent of wage inequality due to race and gender and for relating the potentials of national capitals within an international paradigm.
Botwinick first surveys how orthodox, Labor market segmentationists (LMS), radical and even neo-Marxian economists all use neo-classical presuppositions, such as static general equilibrium frameworks, to explanation wage rates. The negative effects of using such concept that don’t actually occur within the material interactions of capitalist firms in competition on a local and world stage has myriad effects which Botwinick then outlines.
The orthodox economists get trenchant criticism for their explanatory conceptions of human-capital, marginalist, and institutionalist theories. Botwinick deracinates these and other theories of determining wages for their ability to still be considered social science despite the constant transformation. While they may not be precise or work, they have certainly provided many an academic with the opportunity to write a paper to include a new factor in determining wages.
For the radical economists and LMS, this means that though they seek to insert the criteria of class struggle within their explanatory framework of wage pricing, their models are essentially Ptolemizations of the neo-liberal models. Dual labor markets explanations present a myriad of empirical problems, which is seen as the cause for the growing tendency away from theoretical analysis and the movement into case studies – for as the typically used Juglar cycle is extended, the monopoly disappears.
The categories of segmentation used by LMS, periphery and core, are so slippery as to be useless and that many of the so called monopoly effects are simply the result of a period wherein one capital is able to be the regulating factor of the market and Botwinick’s counter-examples of the construction and automotive industry show that it is not the result of human capital qua itself that necessitates higher wages, but by the ability for workers to organize themselves and mobilize against their employers. Additionally, they disavow how it is that labor market segmentation is primarily worker-directed in order to maintain wages rather than a plot by owners to divide and conquer workers.
Addressing the neo-Marxists, he states that the conflation of neo-classical economics concepts of capitalist competition, which is to say one of total fluidity, with the actual conditions embedded in the roughness of material life is a total misreading of Marx. Large capital investments are not barriers, but simply conditions of entry and exit into a specific industry that capitalists must take into account. Botwinick also shows that the regulated pricing adjustment as practiced by capitalists are an attempt to ride the waves of fat and lean years inherent within capitalism. As it relates to wages, however, Botwinick’s exegesis of Marx shows that it is this very varying degree of fixed capital investment across industries creates not only substantial difference between profit rates for companies but potentialities for workers to exploit and gain higher wage.
Such class conflict is always within the limits of the game. The floating, latent, stagnant sectors of the working class as well as the paupers that make up the reserve army of labor is always there, as is the very real likelihood of capitalist divestment and bankruptcy due to ongoing capitalist competition. Given the dialectics of Marx, it should thus come as no surprise that just as mechanization and deskilling counter shirking and soldiering, the reliance upon capital-intensive machinery means that striking workers are able to inflict potentially dangerous costs on owners. Despite this caveat, however, Botwinick doesn’t rely upon a market share model of industry concentration to determine wage variability, but instead uses efficiency and the cost effectiveness of firms.
In chapters six and seven, Botwinick outlines multivariable calculus formations to outline the aspects entering into pricing of products as well as wages per worker that includes the level of fixed cost investment, depreciation and relation to other capitals. His structural analysis is dynamic, not static, and thus provides the link between inter-industry profit rates and the implications for empirical research into regulating and non-regulating capitals, such as the greater importance of plant size than market concentration in determining wages. The focus here on spatial limitations illustrates how some firms are able to obtain preferable market positions due to a unique set of circumstances, and their greater relevance within political economy in general.
These trenchant criticisms and exposition of a viable and preferable alternative to the current neo-classical conceptions of competition are not without end other than to change the manner which economists understand their subject. As Botwinick states throughout, it is not enough to simply to expand the limited scope and length of time that the current conceptions of “monopoly capitalist” relies upon, but to provide a basis for analyzing the limits of workplace conflict for increased wages. From this, Botwinick provides an outline for the American labor force to organize and regain some ground from the business interests that have dominated American politics for over forty years by, among other things, refusing the resource management techniques, fighting battles for international, industry-wide wage increases so that costs can be distributed collectively. While not calling the period of the CIO halcyon explicitly, he does state that this modes of workers organizing does provide many instructive lessons for the rank-and-fail to counter with the prevailing mode of business unionism.
It is interesting to note in closing this review that one of the aspects that would increase the likelihood of the international labor movement increasing their wages would be access to these figures that determine the profitability of the company. I would indeed say, that if Botwinick were writing this book today he would include in his closing that if a website and organization existed similar to Wikileaks but instead only publishing the numbers used by businesses then they would know their enemy in a much more profound way and thus increase their likelihood of achieving their goals.
La Maleta Mexicana
Since moving to Barcelona several events of regional import have occurred. A ban on bullfighting in Catalonia, viewed as a cruel and solely Castillian pastime, has been put into effect. The Popular Party, which began from the ashes of Franquismo and still contains elements of it, has ejected the PSOE from national power. Wide scale revelations of Catholic social agencies falsely pronouncing newborn children dead to their mothers so that their children could be given to deserving Francoists has happened. Additionally, the Civil War pictures of Robert Capa, Chim (David Seymour) and Gerda Taro have returned to Spain. While this last event is of the least world-historical significance, there is good cause to recognize the pictures themselves for their artistic value but to see in it also a return of something precious once lost to Spain’s cultural history. If it weren’t for the fact that the photos reproducible, the return of the photos to Catalonia for the first time would be similar to the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece.
The Civil War is a taboo topic in Spanish society. According to one of my Spanish instructors, the extent of its teaching in schools is that “it happened” and the only to the extent that Franco took power. The sundry reasons for the war, the scope of the tragedy during the war and that afterwards political purges against those sympathetic to the Second Republic killed tens of thousands more are disavowed. Yet what cannot be silenced is the profound influence that such occurrences had on the current makeup of Spanish society. When all that is spoken of is that a political liberalization followed Franco’s death it ignores the fact that many of the potential political activists, intellectuals and other people that could have been significant in institutional statecraft or non-governmental structures were exterminated.
Yet despite the potentially painful and conflict inducing nature of this exhibit, this hasn’t stopped many people from visiting the museum and coming to see them. I have no figures to say just how many people have gone, but I can relate that it wasn’t until the second time that I went to the museum that I was able to see the pictures as the first time the exhibition was filled to capacity and had a long line of people going outside of the MNAC.
The exhibition was organized from the start of the Civil War. The narrative thrust of the pictures, from the speeches of agitators and crowd shots of peasants and factory workers, the first preparations of defense from an assault by those that had once been their neighbors, the ruins following aerial raids, and ground combat was gave an idea of what was going on, however with the above historical understanding there is many things implicitly missing. Unseen are the roving squads of Nationalists going through conquered cities at night in search of those that had been enemies or sympathizers by day. Visible are the poor conditions that the Republican Army and International brigades fought under and their stoic faces when preparing for an air raid by Nazi planes. At the end of the exhibition we learn through that the photographers felt they must flee to Paris and then the United States in order to survive the continued victories of fascism.
The exhibit is designed to show a dialogue between these pictures that were known of and printed in international magazines documenting the war along with the 4,500 other negatives that hadn’t been published. It exudes a certain sadness to it in that not only is the effect of though we see widely publicized pictured hinting at what a new conflict would look like amidst the advanced industrial powers of Europe, people were still unwilling to mobilize in order to prevent it’s occurrence. Along with the pictures themselves were two videos, one of which was an American newsreel, with subtitles in Spanish and the other a film reel shot by Capa, as well as original magazines from the period which used the pictures of the three authors. One of these magazines includes an article by Winston Churchill, which tellingly states that unless the United States is willing to openly declare that it won’t allow any one power to control the European continent that there will be war. Such articles are an interesting accent to the exhibition as they openly hint at the historical context outside the immediate pictures. It displays not only the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, but the idealistic isolationism of the latter and the devastating effects of it’s unwillingness to replicate the balance of power diplomatic policy used by Britain for hundreds of years.
In this regards, despite the fact that very little attention is given to the details of the Spanish Civil War, Henry Kissinger’s writing about this in Diplomacy is highly insightful in pointing out the context wherein virtually every Western power saw a Fascist Spain as less of a danger to their interests than they did a marginally Leftist Spain presumably tied to the Soviet Union. That such a position was radically misinformed, as the Spanish Republicans and Libertarian Communists were not puppets tied to Stalin and certain sections of the myriad groups supporting the left only later came under Soviet influence after the total isolation by the world community left it little choice, only became clear in hindsight for those involved.
While all of this is only visible through a dialectical reading of the pictures, the pictures themselves are significant not only in their documentary nature but in their composition as well. The photos of Branguli, which I wrote about earlier, are another set of images quite literally helps provide a fuller picture to the economic and political developments occurring in Barcelona at this time.
If you cannot get the chance to see them in person – I would highly recommend buying the book showing all of these once thought to be lost pictures.
I’ve not gone into too much detail on the history of the photographers as there is an excellent documentary on Capa and La Maleta Mexicana that once released is eminently worth viewing.
P.O.U.M. Exhibit
Today I went to the Catalyunya National History Museum to see an exhibition on the 75th anniversary of formation of the P.O.U.M. (Partido Obreador Unido Marxist) and was rather underwhelmed by the small room made in their memory. Though their time on the world stage was small, the role they played was large. It is not just Ken Loach and George Orwell who use this group as a way for explaining the conflicts going on within Spain’s Republican Government and the country as a whole during the period of Civil War, but the many International Brigadeers who came to fight on the Republican side voluntarily and were so taken by their experience they made efforts equal to their time on the battlefield to make sure that it would be truthfully recorded for posterity. In fact, this conflict is the first historical occurrence of a concerted, international effort on the part of the defeated to lay out their mistakes, weaknesses and try to arrive at an after the fact assessment of what they should have done differently.
Heroic, unique and thoroughly documented in narrative though their actions may have been, history has not been kind to the P.O.U.M. The dearth of materials curators were able to display is understandable given the P.O.U.M. was a vehicle of the Trotskyist Opposition. Members were under attack from Fascist and Stalinist elements prior to General Franco taking control of Spain. After Franco’s victory physical items indicating membership or sympathy became cause for arrest or disappearance. The slanderous or true accusation by someone to the authorities also meant that you could become one of the hundreds of thousands of Spaniards killed in political purges against the socialists, anarchists, communists, pacifists, militant progressives, anti-clericalists and unionists. As such, the display cases consisted only of red cards indicating membership with the group, several books, pamphlets and newspapers published by the party. It is likely that other artifacts were destroyed out of a sense of self-preservation.
What was the most compelling aspect of this exhibit were the few dozen pictures showing group members not simply fighting on the front lines, but relaxing together on the beach and smiling for the camera in a moment of joy, or sitting at a cafe. These pictures showed a human side that appreciated pleasant distraction and social gatherings in a way that so often gets ignored in discussions of political mobilization and conflict. It showed that those fighting on the battlefields were not doing so simply because they were ideologues who craved conflict or automatons following orders but as they sincerely sought to gain for themselves a manner of living that would allow them to extract more pleasure from life through a better standard of living and working less. Though they recognized that they would need to take a militant stance as the only way they could possibly achieve their desires given the social conditions they inherited, their motivation for doing to was the very opposite of the military ideal, specifically the desire for joy and play. And it is in this humanization of forces that the CNHM did a great job in presenting the P.O.U.M. to those who made it to their 75th anniversary exhibit.