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Chapter Two of Capital, entitled “The Process of Exchange,” seems uncharacteristically short. Marx’s investigation here starts with the assertion that “Commodities cannot themselves go to market…” (p. 178) Indeed, a commodity that could do such a thing would most definitely be rather magical!
Rather than waltz by themselves to the market, commodities, of course, have owners. Generally speaking, that could mean you and me, folks! These owners recognize each other as owners of private property. It is no secret that capitalists are pretty big on the concept of private property; indeed, as Marx notes, relations between owners of private property are “juridical” – and they’re often codified in law as contracts.
When the owners, then, go to the market, they exchange their commodities with each other. Marx notes that in this system, all commodities are non use-values for their owners but “use-values for their non owners.” This is not as convoluted as it may sound. Obviously, if I were to embark on a long trek to the market to sell a pot of honey but then stopped and, like Winnie-the-Pooh, turned that honey into a use-value for myself by devouring it all greedily, I would no longer have a commodity left.
Would not make a successful capitalist
It takes a certain discipline to be a capitalist, no?
So if my pot of honey is to operate as a commodity on the market, it must be a non use-value to me, but a use-value to someone else.
In return for my pot of honey, I will obtain a commodity that is a use-value for me. Maybe a nice bottle of wine! In this part of the process of the exchange, we return to the idea of the universal equivalent that was broached in Chapter 1, whereby, within a simple system of exchange, I consider my pot of honey to be the universal equivalent of whatever I might want on the market. In other words, my pot of honey contains in it, in whole or in part, the equivalent value to any other commodity. But as has been established, the socially-accepted universal equivalent in the market is not usually a pot of honey or a bottle of wine or what have you: generally, it’s a precious metal like gold or silver. It’s money.
Marx notes that, at first, through the system of exchange, the value of commodities gets affixed by “chance.” It is merely the encounter between two owners of commodities that determines that a pot of honey might equal, say, one bottle of wine. In some other context, this exchange might seem a rotten deal. But “the constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social process” (p182). And so, after many thousands of transactions, it becomes not mere chance but rather a socially accepted norm that 1 pot of honey = 1 bottle of wine. Or rather, because we’re operating in a money economy, 1 pot of honey in a simple market = $10, and a bottle of wine is also $10.
In the process of exchange, all commodities have a relationship to money, which is the universal equivalent, or the universal commodity. This means we get away from the idea that 1 pot of honey = 1 bottle of wine. These two commodities, like all commodities, now relate to money, enabling far more complex transactions. Now I can sell 10 pots of honey for $10 each and go home from the market without buying anything if I so choose. I can now horde my money until such a time as there is a glut of wine on the market and then return, like a conquering king, and buy up hundreds of bottles of wine and get leglessly drunk every day for a week. Hollah! (This scenario is taken from my imagination, not from Capital.)
OK, a few final observations in Chapter 2 before Marx moves on quickly on his swift Marxist legs. Or rather with his nimble Marxist fingers. He writes how money is like any other commodity in that it cannot express value in relation to itself; it can only express value in relation to other commodities. So $10 is pretty much valueless unless I exchange it for something other than $10; to realize its value, I need to exchange it for something. Like a kitten or an antique ashtray.
Marx then asks, how does a commodity become money? What alchemy is at work here? Well, as it so happens, there really is no alchemy: “…all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. The movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind” (p187).
In other words, commodities don’t become money, they express their value as money because money is what it is: the socially-accepted universal equivalent.
And let’s not forget that money, as a commodity like any other, is the incarnation of human labour. So within a capitalist mode of production, gold and silver, ripped out of the earth, embody human labour immediately upon their emergence into the system of exchange. Marx concludes that the “money fetish” and the “commodity fetish” are one and the same. In this system, for the hapless workers, “Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action” (p187).
David Harvey, whose lectures are enormously illuminating Capital for me (and thousands more besides), lingers on this point a lot longer than Marx does here in Chapter 2. Harvey says that Marx is agreeing with Adam Smith that capitalism is a system that is not the result of an individual or group. Rather, it is a system that operates according to its own logic, over which individuals or groups are powerless. Smith’s famous “hidden hand of the market” does indeed regulate behaviors and creates values; Marx would nod his bearded head and agree 100%. In so doing, the hidden hand of the market creates a social order. However, Marx parts ways with Ricardo and Smith; unlike them, he does not believe that the social order will be just and that it will benefit everyone. He believes it will benefit the bourgeoisie, that is, the owners of the means of production.
I’ve got a feeling we’re going to hear a little more about these injustices!
This year I’ve decided to try reading Volume 1 of Capital by Karl Marx. With Monika out of town all summer, what else is a bored and lonely leftist to do?
I should note that while I work my way through this immense tome, my pea brain is getting some invaluable assistance from NYU professor, David Harvey, whose lectures on Capital are available in video form.
Really smart guy
Chapter 1 of Capital starts with an exploration of the commodity. A commodity is like the building block of capitalism. The commodities Marx seems most fond of in his discussion are linen, corn and coats. If he’d written it today, he might have discussed gasoline, iPads and Twizzlers.
A commodity is whatever satisfies a human desire or need. That said, not everything that meets a human desire or need is a commodity. If I had the land required (and the skill) to grow myself some nice tasty tomatoes, the fruits of my labours, if consumed by me and my immediate circle (Monika, Banchi, friends), are not commodities. They’re simply tasty homegrown tomatoes! Similarly, in pre-capitalist societies, most of what was produced by the peasants – even if “stolen” by the ruling aristocracy – did not meet the definition of a “commodity.” Because, as a building block of capitalism, a commodity, to be a commodity, must enter into the marketplace.
Marx says a commodity has a use-value and an exchange-value. Boy, there is a lot of time spent discussing use-value and exchange-values. For the reader, it’s a bit of a tough row to hoe. Use value, insofar as my dunce-head can grasp it, describes the particular use a person can make out of a commodity. So to use Marx’s original terms, linen might have a use-value to me because I can make a coat out of it.
Since they’re part of capitalism, commodities, in addition to use value, must also have exchange-values. i.e. they must be something that I can trade in the marketplace.
This is where things get sticky. Because Marx then notes how each and every commodity is exchangeable with every other commodity. And he supposes that this is because each and every commodity must have something in common with each and every other commodity. Since I could, in theory, trade an iPad for a cocker spaniel – or for any other commodity for that matter – there must be something in common between the two commodities to make such a trade possible. There must be something in common between even an iPad and a cocker spaniel. That “something” is a third quality of a commodity that Marx calls value.
Ha, ha, see?! So a commodity is bestowed with use-value, exchange-value, and value. Simple as mud in your eye.
What then, exactly, is value? If commodities have a use-value, which is quite tangible (i.e. I can drink it, eat it, take it for a walk and have it lick my face) as well as an exchange-value, which is also fairly tangible (I can trade it for something else) then what is this third quality of commodities – this mysterious thing called value? Value seems to be an abstraction, since it is not something that I can actually see in the commodity. But whatever this value is would appear to be very important, since it is what makes all commodities exchangeable with each other.
David Harvey really saved my pea brain from total meltdown here. It turns out that value is socially necessary labour time. This is to say that what gives a commodity value is the labour that went into it. But of course, that labour must be “socially necessary” – your labour must create a use-value for somebody else.
So if I were to start Villeray Incorporated (hmm, sounds like a familiar story), and I decided to start manufacturing cat kibbles, in order to satisfy the definition of “commodity” my cat kibbles must have a use-value, an exchange-value, and value. My cat kibbles have use-value because they can be eaten (i.e. by Banchi, or by me, depending on how poverty stricken I am that month); they must also have an exchange-value so that I can exchange them with my neighbor, James, for, say, lettuce from his garden. And lastly, what gives my cat kibbles their exchangeability is the fact that they hold value: their value is that they provide a use-value for somebody else (in this case, for James, because he can feed my yummy cat kibbles to his own cats).
Voilà! Bob’s your uncle: commodities are totally easy to understand!
Or are they?
Marx is not satisfied to say that commodities are bearers of value simply because of the labour that goes into them. Socially necessary labour time is a term that merits a good deal more unpacking. Because it is not at all clear at first glance how exactly socially necessary labour coheres into commodities of value. Does it mean that if I bust my ass manufacturing cat kibbles for 14 hours a day that at the end of the week I have created commodities of great value? This is obviously not a certain thing. Given the means at my disposal, I could hardly manufacture sufficient cat kibbles to be of any great value to anyone else, because I am competing with factories. I might spend a week to create the equivalent of one bag of cat kibbles. The factory-made equivalent could be purchased for under $20. So the context in which labour occurs turns out to be highly important.
Socially necessary labour time is the labour time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society. (p129)
Ah ha! It all makes sense. But while some of us might have been quite happy to go down the bar and celebrate these clever discoveries with some pints, Marx, overachiever that he is, delves even further into his inquiry. He differentiates between concrete labour and abstract labour. The first, concrete labour, creates use-values. If I make a coat out of linen, I have applied my concrete labour into something with a use-value: I can wear it! Marx goes on to generalize about concrete labour in a way to encompass nothing short of the entirety of human history; concrete labour is a condition of human existence. We interact with nature, and have done so since time immemorial, by making use-values out of the material things we find around us. So concrete labour, as a creator of use-value, is not limited to a capitalist mode of production. But when the objects of our labour, commodities, enter into exchange with each other, our labour-power is being abstracted. Our labour becomes the equivalent of somebody else’s labour, as objectified in the commodity which is going to be exchanged. It is abstract labour, no longer merely tied to one particular use-value, but abstracted to a system of exchange with a potentially infinite number of other products of labour.
(This is as far as I can go with concrete v. abstract labour, because to be frank, it was all a bit murky to me.)
Marx goes on to make a wonderful observation about the value of commodities. He notes that you cannot find a value of a commodity within the commodity itself. You cannot take a table, dissect it, and thereby calculate its value. “Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values,” he writes (p138). As David Harvey notes, a similar dynamic is at play when we consider gravity. You can’t calculate a gravitational pull on a stone by dissecting the stone. Gravity only appears when the stone is in relation to other things. Commodities only have value by virtue of their relationships with other commodities. Marx says that these relationships are, by definition, social.
There is no inherent value to a commodity outside of the value that is actualized once it enters the marketplace. If labour is expended to create a commodity that cannot be traded, that commodity is useless. And so too is the labour I expended on it.
Marx now considers something very ingenious indeed. Every commodity is exchangeable with every other commodity, however, as we all know, these exchanges are far from simple and straightforward. If I own a cocker spaniel, I can’t just trade it straight up for, say, a Boeing 747… or a yacht. In a system of straight exchanges, we get used to the idea pretty quickly of saying something like, one Boeing 747 = x cocker spaniel; x in this case might well be in the order of 900 cocker spaniels. Or 19,000 cocker spaniels — I’m not sure, having not tried to buy a Boeing 747 recently.
Marx spells out a few hypothetical examples of exchanges, using linen as the commodity against which all other commodities are compared in value:
1 coat_________
10 1b. tea__________
40 1b coffee___________ = 20 pounds linen
2 ounces gold________
½ ton gold_______
The choice of linen as the basis for comparison is totally arbitrary. Marx could just as well have made it coffee or tea or coats, or what have you. Furthermore, the quantities are pretty arbitrary too. What makes 20 pounds of linen the basis of comparison? Why not 50 pounds? Or one pound?
Within a system of exchange of increasing complexity, the place of linen in the very simple example above is taken instead by some other commodity. This commodity is what is called the universal equivalent. Generally, in capitalist societies, the universal equivalent is gold. What we have all gotten used to over time is the idea of gold as the money commodity. But for the sake of the argument Marx builds here, the money commodity is serving the exact same function as linen in the example above. It is the agreed-upon commodity against which all other commodities will be compared for the sake of discussing value. A cocker spaniel is worth 2 ounces of gold, or 2 dollars, is pretty much the same as saying it is worth, say, 2 pounds of linen.
But where does my breakfast come from?
The last section of Chapter 1 is called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret,” and is perhaps the most interesting and liveliest section to read, but a good deal of it eludes my overtaxed mind muscles. Fetishism is used in this section by Marx to describe the way in which commodities appear to take on a life of their own. Insofar as a commodity is useful (it has a use-value) it is not all that mysterious, but just as soon as it is exchanged, something very strange indeed happens:
it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will (p163-164).
There is another wonderful passage that evokes the mysterious nature of the value of these seemingly animated commodities:
Value… does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic (p167).
This, to me, very much describes the world in which we live, whereby the commodities that surround us appear as objects of value in their own right; these objects have a relation with each other and also with us, but Marx’s contention, I think, is that these relations have obscured the relations between actual flesh and blood human beings. We are encouraged within a capitalist mode of production to personify commodities to the degree that I will say “I love Camembert,” and “I love my new cell phone,” but discouraged from thinking about how we might feel about the labourers who created the Camembert or cell phone in question. Indeed, these things cannot matter too much to us, because while it is fairly straightforward to have a relationship with the limited number of commodities that make up our daily lives, it is downright impossible to have a relationship with the millions of people responsible for making and distributing those same commodities.
David Harvey explains, “People under capitalism do not relate to each other directly as human beings; they relate to each other through the myriad products which they encounter in the market.”
I do not think Harvey here is suggesting (or claiming that Marx is suggesting) that all direct human relationships are impossible under capitalism; there are, after all, human interactions that occur outside of the capitalist mode of production. But whenever a social relation is enacted within a capitalism system of exchange, direct human relationships are rendered impossible.
Harvey fleshes this out in a very tangible way. He asks, “Where does your breakfast come from?”
When I contemplate the smorgasbord that I might serve up on a Saturday morning: mangoes and cherry jam and croissants and coffee and milk and so on, it quickly becomes apparent that answering Harvey’s question is almost impossible, or would be, at least, the result of a good week of investigation. Of course, all these food commodities came from the corner epicerie, but this was only the last step on what was a very long journey involving countless human beings and hours of human labour.
Capitalism, Marx argues, has concealed the human relationships behind commodities — those on my table or anywhere else. When it comes to commodities, we generally hold something like an iPad in very high esteem, but the labourer who made it? Not so much. Apple anounces the iPad to be a “magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable low price.” I think that this hyperbolic language is part of what Marx has in mind when he talks of commodity fetishism. The iPad is no more “magical” than a hammer; it does exactly what it is supposed to do according to the properties invested in it by the humans that invented it and the human labour that enabled its mass production. As for “unbelievable price…” How often do we hear in capitalism the apparent language of religion to describe concepts such as pricing that are actually quite banal in their rationality? The price of an iPad is not unbelievable; it is exactly the price that Apple has calculated to cover the cost of production (which includes, in part, the pay to the workers) while ensuring a healthy return to the company and its owners. So Steve Jobs can be even richer.
What is not mentioned in the language of commodity fetishism that swirls enthusiastically around the iPad is our social relation with the workers that manufactured the gizmos in the first place. They apparently work in conditions so grim that several of them have committed suicide. You can find out here lots more about human rights abuses, brutal hours and low pay at the iPad sweatshop. When confronted with a news story like that, it’s yet another reminder about the contradictions in capitalism: the smooth sheen of the surface versus the sweat and squalor that lies underneath. Both surface and underlying conditions are real, but we must acknowledge both to understand what is going on.
What I find fascinating in Marx is to see the terms and concepts and internal contradictions that he exposes in capitalism playing out all around you in the real world every single day.
And that’s just chapter 1!
As oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, the result of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion April 20, it seems appropriate to post my latest article for the warehouse. It’s based on an interview with Antonia Juhasz, and discusses the stranglehold the oil industry has had on American policy thanks to its enormous wealth and lobbying/legal activities. Scarcely a couple of weeks after I interviewed Juhasz, she was arrested while protesting at a Chevron stakeholders meeting and thrown into jail. You can find more about that here at Democracy Now.
Read it!
There is a great article over here at alternet about the Tea Party in America, arguing that we dismiss at our peril this tax-hating, immigrant-resenting, Obama-resisting movement composed mostly of white, older, prosperous curmudgeons. It echoes some of the things Chris Hedges has said for a while: namely, that America is home to a growing body of neo-fascist sympathizers, people who are basically scared of any kind of future that might see their privileges in any way compromised for the benefit of other classes and/or minorities.
What is most disturbing about the Tea Party is its growing tendency to valorize direct resistance to the government. There is an important nuance here — resistance to governments one disapproves of has a long and very proud history, of course, and I wholeheartedly support the idea. But the Tea Party does not appear to see resisting and transforming the existing government as its major form of political involvement. Instead, much of its rhetoric implies that, just as American colonists threw off the yoke of British Empire, so too should the contemporary “oppressed” violently overthrow the yoke of Obama’s encroaching “socialism.”
With its predilection for authoritarianism, the Right has generally ceded to the Left the defiant tactics of street protests and rallies. But over time, a narrative promoted by such right-wing leaders as Patrick J. Buchanan and Howard Phillips has taken hold, one that demands acts of defiance as proof of one’s patriotism: right-wing populism imagined as the story of the American Revolution. “Dismiss the Tea Parties at Your Peril”
Can anyone imagine what kind of “revolution” might take place in America with Tea Party fanatics in the vanguard? I suppose that what this right-wing revolution might look like is determined, to some extent, by its membership and their values. While the French Revolution trumpeted the Enlightenment ideas of a growing class of bourgeoisie who believed to varying degrees in equality, human rights, the rule of law, freedom, rationality, democracy, the progressive tendency in the development of mankind, and property ownership (ugh!), the Tea Party movement seems to espouse values of a class that has less than universal ambitions:
Tea Party activists rarely speak of race when recounting their grievances; they talk of “culture” — American culture, of course, which they define by the cultural attributes of a particular type of white heterosexual man, one described as the provider for and defender of his family. He speaks English, may own a gun, and perceives himself as asking nothing from his government but the defense of the nation from invaders.
But a revolution of Tea Partiers would not simply be about the assertion of a formerly dominant white patriarchy. There is not only a “culture war” happening here. There is also economic conflict:
Look at it through the eyes of one of these men: Wages have been stagnant for more than 30 years. Over the course of those years, it’s become increasingly difficult to “get ahead” in a culture where doing better than your parents is the measure of success, a culture in which the acquisition of stuff is seen as a measure of one’s Americanism.
You look around you: some people are making gains relative to their previous position, be they black, Latino, female or gay. It doesn’t matter that their previous position was one of disempowerment…
The author goes on to talk about how a movement born of such resentment might achieve its greater aims in mainstream politics. The Tea Party, the author claims, will operate like a virus:
…injecting its DNA into the host body, so that the host body becomes overrun with right-wing cells. In our nation’s two-party system, the host body is the Republican Party. In a two-party system, the other side wins from time to time. The more infected one party is with the virus of fear and resentment, the more destructive our politics become.
The article never contemplates what might be the eventual result of such a virus successfully destroying the current system of democracy called the United States of America. Instead, the article examines how progressives might fight back. I suppose the job of imagining the triumph of the Tea Party, or something like it, could instead fall to fiction writers. It wouldn’t be a particularly happy task, but it might be an exciting one in its own chilling way.
While I really enjoyed the alternet article, and found it to be about the most thorough analysis of the Tea Party yet to appear online, I do wonder if the article is perhaps committing a few errors of ommission, and as a result, neutralizing some of the useful arguments that the Left could use to mobilize against the Right. On most issues, I suppose, the extremes of the Tea Party will never see eye-to-eye with the Left — or at least not what passes as the Left in America. But in some respects, the Tea Party has tapped a reservoir of underground rage that is in many respects justified, and the Left really should pay heed.
The Tea Party deplores the bail-out of the banks, the biggest transfer of taxpayer money to the wealthy elite in history. And so it should!
The Tea Party deplores the incursion of the government into so many aspects of people’s lives. And so it should!
The Tea Party bemoans the passing of the “Old America.” Hmmm.
Now, I am not entirely surely what that Old America is all about. I am neither old nor American, but such an America did apparently exist at one time, and, if you’ll excuse the apparent digression, you can read about it in this wonderful Garrison Keillor article, “The Old America is Fading,” (as an aside, Keillor is even better if you listen to him on the radio; I remember my parents doing so when we lived for a year in Illinois in 1982).
Keillor writes:
Children don’t wander free and mess around in vacant lots the way we used to — they’re in daycare now or enrolled in programs, and one worries about a certain loss of verve and nerve among the young who’ve been under constant supervision for too long.
And the old hometown is no longer a town but has morphed into suburban anonymity, and it hurts me. My grandmother taught school there, my grandfather came in 1880 and served on the town board that brought in telephone service and paved the roads, but their community of mutual assistance is gone, gone, gone. I have old friends in their 80s who’ve lived in that town for 50 years — good citizens, church people, passionate volunteers and solid Republicans — and in a crisis, when their health took a bad turn, nobody noticed. Neighbors don’t know each other; ambulances come and go and nobody comes by to ask what’s going on. The community they thought they were part of simply doesn’t exist anymore. If you fall by the wayside, you may as well be in the wilds of Alaska.
I believe Keillor puts his finger on something here that transcends Democrat/Republican and Right/Left. He’s evoked a feeling; a sense of a human scale of living. And that human scale has been swallowed up. It’s between swallowed up by suburban developers, Wal-Marts, and the growing tendency to try and organize every part of human activity according to some greater economic good.
That greater good is why kids of “helicopter parents” can’t loaf around in back alleys and get bored and have dreams.
And Obama has become about the biggest killjoy of dreams around.
America, under Obama, is run by exactly the kind of oligarchy that has little patience with that old small town spirit. America, under Obama, is scrambling to restore ever bigger banks to ever-greater heights of profitability, America is expanding the War on Terror (now to Pakistan), America is looking to inflate speculative markets into a giant, precarious bubble one more time.
The Left is currently barking up the wrong tree in continuing to hope that Obama can revive America’s economic system and make it work again. Should Americans trust Obama and the Democrats to take down the Tea Party? Hell no! These are people who still believe the American system is rational, that it’s just suffering a bit of a setback, that if people could just abandon their gut-felt prejudices and hatred and accept each other and work together instead of fighting then the economy would rebound and prosperity would return and we’d be back to the apparent heyday of the Clinton 1990s or something like that.
This is wishful thinking. Moreover, it’s a narrative without a logical conclusion. You can’t revive a system that has failure built into its DNA. This kind of discourse and mindset is fatal, in my view, to the Left.
The Right is “winning the battle of hearts and minds.” It has been for quite a while. Obama’s election victory was only a short-term victory of marketing.
The Tea Party is growing in number because it has appealed to people’s hearts not their minds — and the Left must steal a page from that same book if it’s to achieve anything. I’ll admit, like many on the Left, the seeming triumph of gut-check style politics perturbs me, because I’d like to believe that if certain rational truths were better known then Tea Partiers and their ilk could be persuaded to abandon their misguided prejudices and grievances. If, for example, one could rationally make the case to the population that it’s the War on Terror that degrades the beloved Constitution and NOT the spectre of public healthcare then perhaps the rabid warmongers might second-guess their allegiance to the military.
But that’s just naive. A strong dose of education and informed debate will improve the lot of everyone? No, it’s a liberal fantasy and I don’t believe in it anymore.
I’m not going to say abandon the mind in politics, but let’s give equal attention to matters of the heart. Let’s start by stating that more than truth, consistent argumentation, or Enlightenment ideals, people crave a nice place to live. The kind of small town that Keillor describes sounds awfully appealing to a lot of people. And if my elders are to be believed (James Howard Kunstler also bemoans the loss of small town America and the ascendancy of what he calls the Geography of Nowhere) it appears that for many Americans, such a place used to exist. And it existed in Canada — and probably Britain — too.
Now any rational progressive knows it wasn’t immigration that diminished that happy, prosperous, civic-minded town, and it wasn’t feminism, and it wasn’t gays, and it wasn’t transgendered people or anarchists or Starbucks-sipping liberals either!
What did in the so-called small-town America of yore was greed on a globalized scale. I am sure one day this can be worked into a narrative that can appeal just as much to the heart as to the mind. Such a unifying narrative is sorely needed.
Rather than constructing such a narrative, the alternet article suggests organizing politics against the Tea Party in quite a different way. It suggests that
…to thwart the Tea Party movement from making further inroads, progressives have to re-coalesce not just around elections, but around issues. Immigration reform needs to become the issue of gay-rights activists and feminists. Women’s rights need to be advanced by environmentalists and labor unions. Racial equality, energy reform, Wall Street reform — these all have to become everybody’s issues at some level.
And this is where I jump off the author’s bandwagon. It’s a bit like being lectured that you gotta eat your broccoli when somebody says “these all have to become everybody’s issues at some level.”
These are all of course worthy issues. But the thing is, they don’t sound compelling to a critical mass. They lack the overarching power of the narrative that the Tea Party — no matter how silly and inconsistent it is — has harnessed to its nefarious aims. The Tea Partiers argue — truthfully — that America has changed and they don’t like it. Then they scream and shout about it rather petulantly. But a resurgent Left should start with exactly the same Chapter One.
America has changed and we don’t like it. And when I say we, I mean also those of us who live in other Western democracies who’ve seen many similar changes in our own backyards.
Then, in Chapter Two, instead of resorting to wishing we were back in the Old America — which never existed for everyone, and moreover, depended on a confluence of events that we’ll never see again (cheap oil, very few world economic competitors, a post-War reconstruction boom) — rather than try and revive a Myth, let’s imagine a better future. Recent history, at any rate, seems to show that trying to stitch a quilt out of a patchwork of issues — gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose, immigration — leaves the Left rather threadbare. To combat the growing power of the Right, we need our own over-arching narrative that tells us how we got here and where we should go next. We need as compelling a grand narrative as Marx told over a hundred years ago.
In fact, to overlook for a minute the rather unpopular “brand identity” of communism, you could start nowhere better than with “workers of the world unite.” Because if there is one thing that truly is universal, it’s that all of us work or live off the ails of productive work. Chapter Two could start,
“The worker has found himself under increasing assault for three decades. Gay, straight, black, white, Hispanic, he/she inherits a world that has been run for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Large corporations willfully plunder and pollute the world for the sake of short-term profit and unless their power is checked, ordinary people everywhere will inherit a world that can scarcely sustain them.
It’s time to take the power back.”
I can pinpoint the exact moment in time when I realized that my everyday life had been modestly altered by my thoughts about the impending end of civilization as we know it. I was sitting in a small meeting room of a company located in the Montreal region. A Human Resources manager was explaining my benefits and pension to me. I had just commenced the job, and it was the kind of job that a good number of that company’s employees were happy to work for life – meaning that their financial contributions probably would amount to a secure and prosperous future. Yes, yes, very sensible, I thought. But in my usual contrarian and stuck-up way, I didn’t give a damn.
To not care about benefits and pension – that wasn’t new. When I was in my early twenties I sat through similar meetings and I didn’t care about my pension because my pension was forty years away and thus an abstraction. More recently, however, my abject apathy has been based on something different. In that meeting room, during the talk of tax deductions and employer contribution and RRSPs, a rather childish monologue was playing inside my head that went something like this.
“You’re asking me to think about my security in the year 2040? What on earth can I stash away in the bank that will ensure my security in the year 2040? Good Lord, the entire banking system might well have collapsed by then. There could be anarchy, looting, and cannibalism on the streets of New York. Or we could be living under the jackboot of totalitarian oppression and have all our property conviscated by the state. One thing is for sure – to assume we’re going to live the same way in 2040 as we do now, with our RRSPs and suburban bungalows and barbecues and Winnebagos – well, it’s just that, an assumption.”
This monologue in my head has only cranked up in amplification with every passing month since – the voice that tells me that investing in the present for the hope of future gain is probably rather futile. Nevertheless, rationally, I know that I should pay my debts and that I should try and buy property some day, because, like everyone else, I am living by the logic of the current system.
But that doesn’t make the present seem any less surreal to me. When I try and describe to myself what I think is going on, the only fitting analogy that illuminates events of the day is addiction – en masse. What we’re addicted to is a lifestyle that by its very nature is going to kill us. It’s fuelled by oil. It’s dependent upon treating the world as if it were an infinite garbage dump that can absorb all the toxins and pollutants we throw at it. Nevertheless, the pathology of addiction is a fascinating one. As individuals, or as a collective, we dance from elation to depression and self-loathing with the subconscious knowledge that the party will crash and burn sooner or later. But while it’s raging, this party can be awfully exciting.
Alberta Tar Sands: The biggest damage to nature is usually done far away from the teeming masses of the urban centres.
In this brief segment of Examined Life, Slavoj Žižek talks about the self-induced deception of our time – that “all this disappears” – all this being shit in the toilet, garbage in the dumpster, etc. In my article about the impending decline of oil production, we see a similar self-induced deception at work – the idea that we will somehow – miraculously – always find sufficient energy sources to power our current economy.
The Human Resources manager would say that the safest bet in this day and age would be to trust the bank with 10% of your income so that at 65 years of age you may retire happily. But one could argue with equal credibility, I think, that the safest bet would be to say, “Fuck the banking system” – that gang of crooks who brought us the recession (Goldman Sachs is under investigation for fraud now, ha!), and fuck the Canada Pension Plan and Social Services, etc. Yeah, fuck it all, and instead, invest in the tangible fruit of Mother Nature. Don’t have an RRSP, don’t go to an urban “adult living community.” Buy a farm close to a source of fresh water – a brook, a great river, a lake – with ample forestland in the vicinity so that you may burn log fires in the hearth. Learn how to grow vegetables and how to cultivate a small orchard, learn how to repair bicycles and how to darn your socks. Give a middle finger to the system entirely.
For the most part, though, I resist the prospect of living off the land, because – like a good many people, probably the vast majority, in fact – my concept of self has been built within the logic of our current mode of existence. And therein lies the tension of any reasonably socially aware individual living nowadays. How is one supposed to negotiate the tricky balance of investing in the now, with the almost certain knowledge that the now is an illusion? That it is a form of society-wide madness…
This is what makes 2010 a depressing but also exhilarating time to live in. In the future, we will almost certainly have to invent a new purpose – not just for living – but for our own consciousness. Because it isn’t Mother Nature or the inexorable law of the market that magically bestowed on us the pathology of addiction. We addicted ourselves. We got used to the idea of expansion, of a world constantly growing, of a world always magically giving us more of everything. Growth became the central belief system of any individual living in the Western world in the 20th century and beyond. Fifty years ago, it would have been entirely logical to invest in a pension and in a suburban house and in a trust fund for my eventual progeny. But now the logic of those choices are open to debate, because this form of life was only rendered possible by an extraordinary and unique confluence of moments in history – moments that will not endure: relative peace in North America and Western Europe, the ubiquity of cheap oil, and the timely intervention of technology to harness that oil to ephemeral blessings such as the Green Revolution, heart transplants, the social welfare state, etc.
To be relatively well-adjusted in the future, we’ll need to unleash imagination. We’ll have to imagine reasons for optimism, for benevolence, for love, in a world that isn’t growing, but quite possibly shrinking. We’ll imagine reasons for happiness that aren’t based on giving out goodies at Christmas or flying out to visit the family in Omaha or buying a tricked-out Honda Civic. We’ll imagine what we might give our children when our resources to do so are a fraction of that enjoyed by our parents. We’ll imagine, not a three-bedroom house in a quiet suburb, but quite possibly a shack in a copse of trees surrounded by – I dunno – wolves and bears!
Many of us might live in this imaginary realm long before the realm of reality catches up with it. And perhaps to do so is just as crazy as what anyone else is doing. Nevertheless, I plan to keep on doing it. Because what I’m trying to imagine is myself freed of addiction and the roller-coaster ride of elation, depression and self-loathing that addictions entail.
This news story seems a bit of a big deal. The US strategy headed into November’s climate talks in Mexico has been leaked to The Guardian. In it, there is fairly little doubt that the United States is not committed to significant cuts, and moreover, wants to foist the lacklustre agreement reached in Copenhagen on the whole world. This is example #1938, I believe, of how Obama says one thing and does another. Of course, Canada will no doubt be right in line behind its buddy.
My article about peak oil, which includes an interview with James Howard Kunstler, is now online.
If you’ve ever driven or been driven somewhere, used a plastic container or its contents, eaten the produce of a fertilized field, purchased goods transported by airplane, truck or boat – in short, if you’ve done anything except live the life of a feudal peasant, you have been benefitting massively from oil and its derivatives. Just a few of our favourite oil products include gasoline, diesel, naptha, kerosene, ethylene, propylene, benzene, ammonia, methanol, plastics, synthetic fibres, synthetic rubbers, detergents, and chemical fertilisers.
“Life as we know it today would be extremely difficult without crude oil and its by-products,” declares OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries).
No kidding.
In The Long Emergency, a book I remember making a small media storm upon its release in 2005, author James Howard Kunstler invites us to imagine a world in which oil supply is highly contested, and eventually, a world in which oil might no longer be readily available at all.
Read the rest at the warehouse.
I’d say this is a pretty accurate summary of all that ails the Federal Liberal Party. I rarely read Maclean’s, but this time, Andrew Coyne’s article made me glad I did.
It really is a head-scratcher that a political party can be so “listless” as Coyne puts it, especially in light of all the exciting and radical new ideas that are surely merited right now. Canada needs a radical new economic plan that will completely curb and reverse our dependency on fossil fuels. We need to totally re-orient our foreign policy so we are no longer America’s little imperial buddy. We need massive decentralization – not to the provinces – but to cities and rural municipalities, so that citizens are empowered to tackle their local problems. We need a massive clean-up of corruption, which is endemic – especially in Quebec. We need to chart an alternative to economic growth, because left untended, growth — ironically — will shrink human civilization out of recognizable existence within our lifetimes.
At least that’s what I think!
The UK is kicking off its first truly competitive election in well over a decade, and as you’ll see in this surprising article, the Labour Party has decided to base its strategy on the tougher and more menacing attitude of its leader, Gordon Brown.
We live in enlightened times, huh? Perhaps in future elections, leaders can just contest the battle with baseball bats or large sticks, and thus spare us all the hassle of walking, cycling, or driving to the polls.
This UK manly contest sort of reminds me of the Canadian election in which Alliance leader Stockwell Day squared off against Jean Chretien, and each leader ensured that they were filmed looking as virile and athletic as possible. A cynical pundit at the time suggested that the only way Canadians would know who was the more manly leader would be if both leaders agreed to have sex with their respective wives on national television
Of course, in the British context, there is also a certain class consciousness at play here, given that the Tory David Cameron is a notoriously rich Eton toff. Posh boys, we are to assume, have lily white hands and would probably cry if they broke a fingernail in a fight.
Or, of course, this could all be an April Fool’s Day prank.
Even hipsters eat food sometimes. That’s just part of the conclusion you will inevitably draw from this interesting Salon article. What’s the skinny here? It turns out that when the economic downtown in America laid the boots to practically all of the economy except for oil, banking, and military invasions, hipsters – those ironically dressed, messy haired, slouching, indie-band loving kids – started to feel the pinch just like anyone else. The result has been that some unemployed or underemployed hipsters qualify for federal food stamps, which they have been known to redeem for organic salmon, Japanese eggplant, mint chutney, and other suspiciously fresh and tasty foods.
Here is a hipster for those unfamiliar with their appearance. (See the original at this great blog here.)
Anatomy of a Hipster. Used with permission from Alanna Cavanagh. http://alannacavanagh.blogspot.com/
After the original article was posted, and apparently ticked off people who can’t stand it when the poor get a healthy diet, Salon followed it up with this: a personal defence from a self-confessed hipster in Baltimore. As you can read for yourself, he acquits himself admirably.
While organic and local foods seem like luxury items to many, it’s important to understand that cheap food is the result of government subsidies while local farmers get little to no assistance. Cheap food is the real extravagance. My interest in food stems from my having to care for a diabetic father, and good food is the only form of healthcare I have access to.
Hmmm. This doesn’t sound even remotely ironic; it actually sounds rather earnest. But there’s more.
Ultimately, though, this debate isn’t about my personal story, it’s about the shifting class boundaries in this country. The comments both attacking and defending people like me reflect the insecurities and fears we all harbor in a nation where, in a time of corporate bailouts and “Too Big To Fail,” even upper-middle-class people struggle to put food on the table.
Shortly thereafter, the hipster – OK, it’s Gerry Mak, he’s humanized himself enough now to warrant a name – deftly summarizes how economic hard times have dashed outmoded assumptions about what poverty looks like. Poverty these days might be quoting Kierkegaard to you in the food bank line.
…there is yet a deeper debate about whether we can, in a deep recession with record unemployment rates, make the same old assumptions about class based on race, occupation and education, particularly when increasingly, only poorly paid, unprotected, insecure jobs are available even to people with master’s degrees.
Reading the comments section is illuminating. The spectre of the “deserving poor” raises its head, as it appears to have done ever since Charles Dickens’ time.
Personally, I am quite comfortable with hipsters using food stamps to buy organic salmon. I am not sure why some would appear to prefer it if poor people denied themselves the pleasure of a nice meal; there’s some Puritanical loathing going on there. Moreover, I think organic salmon beats Hamburger Helper or some other pile of mass-produced shit any day.
