UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

There has been a good deal of speculation about the hour-long video that has surfaced of the now truly infamous supposedly private Mitt Romney speech to $50,000 a plate donors.  [I use the adjective "infamous" in its proper meaning, "detestable or shamefully malign," not in its current misusage as simply "widely known."]  Present in  the room were Romney, the fat cats, and servants scurrying about bringing the food and clearing the dirty plates.  The angle of the video makes it clear that it was not recorded by one of the guests, so we can only conclude that one of the wait staff managed to set up a camera and film the proceedings.

Upper classes always ignore the presence of their servants, a fact that gave rise to an entire genre of eighteenth century French comedy.  [Think "The Marriage of Figaro" without the immortal music.]  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they seem constitutionally incapable of remembering that the working class is populated by actual human beings with eyes and ears and fully functional intelligence.  This failure is ideological, not personal, in nature.  Were the rich and powerful of the world to acknowledge the full humanity of those they exploit, they would find it difficult to sustain the easy air of superiority that they consider their birthright.

I had a personal experience of this ancient truth more than twenty-five years ago in Johannesburg.  I had gone to South Africa for six weeks to lecture to the second year Philosophy majors at the University of the Witwatersrand on the thought of Karl Marx, a subject that had never until then been included in the undergraduate Philosophy curriculum.  The Chair of the Philosophy Department in those days was Jonathan Susman, nephew of the famous anti-apartheid activist and member of Parliament Helen Susman.  Jonathan invited me to join him for dinner at an old and very exclusive Johannesburg men's club.  I rented a tux [one of only four times in my life that I have worn a monkey suit] and joined him for a private dinner with, among others, the editor of one of the leading newspapers, an executive of a major bank, and the CEO of a mining company.

I was, to put it as gently as I can, a bit out of my element.  [The chap sitting next to me, in an effort to be friendly, turned to me at one point and asked, "Well, Bob, are you a club man?" meaning, I suppose, did I belong to an American counterpart of this men's club.  I allowed as how I was not.]  A good deal of the conversation concerned a bombing raid that the South African air force had launched against suspected anti-apartheid rebel forces in Zimbabwe.  [This was well before Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were released from Robben Island], about which the newspaper editor had some inside information.

As the men chatted, silent waiters moved about the room, serving us.  I sat there and wondered which of them was taking note of everything that was said and reporting it back to associates of the armed struggle inside South Africa.  My dinner hosts seemed blithely unaware that this could even be a possibility.

At Romney's rich donor dinner, it is a virtual certainty that the wait staff consisted of men [and perhaps women -- one cannot tell from the video] who make too little money to pay federal income taxes, and hence are among the 47% whom Romney says are dependent moochers who cannot take personal responsibility for their lives.  These people were obviously in full view of Romney as he stood at the podium and spoke for more than an hour.  The fact that it obviously never occurred to him that he was talking about people present in the room says more about Romney than any formal biography or hatchet job expose possibly can.

BUT I REPEAT MYSELF

Some truths are so important that they bear repeating.  One such truth is that for as long as the Republic has existed, the key to an understanding of American politics has been race.  This truth was once again borne in upon me by the extraordinary video that has surfaced of Mitt Romney's impromptu talk to a closed meeting of fat cat Republican donors.  [A second, subordinate, truth of contemporary American public life is that everything, without exception, has been captured on a handheld device by somebody or other and can be counted on to surface when least convenient.]

Romney's surreptitiously recorded speech is widely viewed, on the right as well as on the left, as having put paid to any lingering dreams the Republicans might have had of winning the election.  As Tallyrand is reputed to have said about Napoleon's murder of the duc d'Enghien, it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.  What can Romney have been thinking when he casually dismissed 47% of Americans as free-loading moochers incapable of caring for themselves and slavishly beholden to Democrats throwing them slops?  Never mind that Romney had his facts completely wrong.  I think we have become accustomed to that.  But in the midst of an election that he is currently losing, what can have possessed him to speak condescendingly and contemptuously of a tad less than half of the American electorate?

The answer, as always, is race.  Let me repeat what I have written here before.  Both before and after the Civil War, poor whites in the South and also in the North, bemired in a socially and economically disadvantaged position in American society, consoled themselves with the thought that however poor they were, however much they were disrespected by their wealthier and socially more prominent betters, at least they were not Black!  In both the North and the South, here was a permanent underclass toward whom they could show disdain, whom they could discriminate against, and on occasion whom they could lynch with impunity.  That structural fact of American life was written into the Black Codes -- laws that reinstituted de facto servitude  after the end of formal, legal slavery; it was written into Jim Crow, into the exclusionary racial covenants that kept Black families trapped in ghettoes, into the racial quotas at Northern colleges, and into the devil's compact between employers and White labor unions that kept former slaves from any chance of securing good industrial jobs.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement in ending Jim Crow, in breaking down the barriers to employment, and in winning the vote for Black citizens deprived poor Whites of their only consolation for their disadvantaged condition, and they reacted with anger, bitterness, and a deep sense of betrayal.  It is the bitter residue of this ressentiment that explains the tenacity with which poor and lower middle class Whites vote against their economic interest by supporting Republican candidates whose policies sink them ever deeper into economic despair.

Mitt Romney knew what he was saying when he described 47% of Americans as takers, moochers, free-loaders.  He was talking about Black and Brown Americans, and he was talking to White America.  The numbers do not matter, nor do the facts.  What mattered was a desperate attempt to tap into that deep well of bitterness and try to transform it into a winning coalition of White voters. 

Happily, he will fail.  But he is not a fool, and what he did was not in fact a blunder.  It was one last resurrection of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy.

EMBARRAS DE RICHESSES

There was a young man in my Harvard College class ['54] who really got on everyone's nerves.  His name was David Shapiro.  He was absolutely brilliant, and picture book handsome.  But what really got under our skins was the fact that he was really, really a nice guy.  It didn't seem fair, somehow.  Sort of like Angelina Jolie, who in addition to being the most gorgeous woman in the world is also a committed activist for humanitarian causes.  I mean, why couldn't she just marry famous men, like Marilyn Monroe?

The French have a lovely phrase for this phenomenon.  They call it an embarras de richesses.  That must be the way the Obama campaign feels this morning.  The video of Mitt Romney's despicable comments to a closed door meeting of rich donors, coming on top of his ill-considered comments about the violence in Libya and Egypt, which in turn followed Clint Eastwood's world-class comedy routine at the Republican Convention, must leave the Obama campaign ad planners at a loss to know which disaster to feature in their thirty second spots.  Truly, an embarras de richesses.

Shapiro, by the way, after marrying a lovely woman whom I dated briefly, went on to become a distinguished Harvard Law professor, a leading expert on Civil Procedure who has, on occasion, generously offered support and encouragement to my son, Tobias, whose field is also Civil Procedure.  For that, I can forgive him anything.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

This has been a big week for me at Bennett College.  I have been driving the 50 miles to Greensboro every day [I leave once again in an hour], visiting classes with my research expert, Ms. Dania Francis, who is being paid on the Spencer Foundation grant I was able to secure.  Dania is a brilliant young woman -- graduated from Smith College at nineteen, went to Harvard to do Economics and did not take to that rather odd environment, left Academia for a while, and is now about to get her doctorate in Public Policy at Duke University.  Dania lives in Boston with her husband and her tiny baby, Sloan.  Her dissertation director at Duke is William "Sandy" Garrity, Jr.

Sandy Garrity's father was William Garrity Sr, the founding Dean at UMass of the School of Health Sciences.  Bill Garrity was one of a small band of African-American scholars and administrators who for decades served as an informal network of support for the Black students who found their way to UMass.  When I joined the UMass Afro-American Studies Department, after twenty-one years on the campus in the Philosophy Department, I learned of this community within the commuinity for the first time.  It was one of the many things I learned about UMass by changing departments.

While Dania was on the Bennett Campus, I took her in to meet Esther Terry, my former Chair of Afro-American Studies at UMass and now the Interim President of Bennett.  Esther, of course, was an old and very good friend of the Garritys, and she greeted Dania warmly, in effect welcoming her into that circle.  The next day, Dania had a meeting wtih Sandy Garrity at Duke about her dissertation, and when we met later that day at Bennett, she said that she had told him about meeting Esther.

"I think she used to baby-sit me," this distinguished senior Duke professor said.

It takes a village.

A GEDANKENEXPERIMENT

All of you, I am sure, are aware of public opinion surveys showing that astonishing numbers of Americans believe mindlessly stupid things.  A recent Gallup Poll, for example, tells us that 46% of Americans believe that the earth was created ten thousand years ago.  These same people blithely answer "yes" when asked whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together.  What are we to make of information like this?

One natural response is to conclude that there are well over one hundred million ignorant, dead stupid Americans.  I am not aware of ever having had a conversation with one of these folks, but since, like all sensible people, I trust Gallup implicitly, I can only infer that I have thus far led a charmed life.  People who are this appallingly ignorant of the simplest facts of natural science, one would think, ought to be unable to function at even a minimally effective level in the modern world.  If they really believe the world was created ten thousand years ago, what sense can they make of the solar system, of computers, of the internal combustion engine, indeed of a vacuum cleaner?  Do they refuse to fly, fearing that the airplane will fall out of the sky?  Do they, on entering an elevator, look about anxiously to see whether the elevator slaves are ready to haul on the cables and raise the car?  Do they, each time they flip a light switch, step back to avoid the flare of the match as secret candles are lit?

I have been brooding on these and similar questions, and I have an alternative hypothesis.  Mind you, I have no direct confirmatory evidence for this hypothesis, so let us label it armchair speculation.  I offer it for your consideration, purely as what physicists call a gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment.

I have a suspicion that when a Gallup pollster asks these folks "Do you believe that the world was created in its present form ten thousand years ago?", what the respondents really hear is a lengthy and very complex question that goes something like this:

"In America today there is a sizeable minority of adults who have Bachelor's Degrees or more from good schools, who hold cushy jobs with nice salaries in comfortable offices, who live in upscale communities like Chapel Hill and Shaker Heights and Cambridge and Hyde Park, who expect to be, and are, accorded respect and deference in restaurants, doctor's offices, airline lounges, and bank lobbies, and whose cultural preferences are echoed on television and in magazines.  These people look down with a genial condescension on people like you.  They do not share your religious affiliations nor do they really respect them, though they may pay lip service to the notion that all religions are to be accorded superficial courtesy.  And they would not be caught dead in the neighborhood in which you live or at the events where you amuse yourself.  Now, do you accept the fact that you are among the disrespected, the condescended to, the left out, the social, intellectual, and cultural underclass of America?  Are you prepared to tug your forelock or touch your cap in acknowledgement of your inferior status?  Of course, I am not going to ask you this question directly.  Instead, I am going to ask you whether you think God created the world in its present form ten thousand years ago.  But you and I understand that this is really a shorthand code version of the longer question, and I quite well realize that if you answer my little question 'yes' you are really answering my longer question 'no!' "

That is what I think is going on when we get these bizarre poll results.  Looked at this way, the responses make sense, and are, I might even suggest, honorable.  If we want to reduce the number of people who say the world was created ten thousand years ago, we will be wasting our time pushing for better science courses in high school.  What we really need to do is to break down the class barriers and wealth and income inequality in American society.  But that, I am afraid, is a very much larger project.

A SHORT ANSWER TO A SERIOUS COMMENT FROM CHRIS

On September 6th, after I bemoaned the lack of things to blog about, Chris asked me whether I might do a tutorial on Volume III of CAPITAL.  I responded with a post on the 10th briefly explaining why I did not think it would be much fun, and Chris immediately took exception to my explanation, citing and giving links to videos of lectures by Andrew Kliman, as well as to some publications.  I am currently very busy with my Bennett project, and I simply do not have the time to watch the videos from start to finish and read the works referenced, so that I can give a serious reply.  But it seems to me I owe Chris some answer, however fragmentary, so here goes.

As I suspected, Kliman is a student or follower of Richard Wolff and Steven Resnick, both of them old friends of mine from the UMass Economics Department.  Rick and Steve have for more than thirty years been developing and teaching a systematic interpretation of Marx's economic theories.  In true academic fashion, they have published books and articles, trained students, organized annual conferences, started a journal, and done all the other things that we do in the Academy to advance our views.  I have enormous respect both for their work and for their dedication and energy, even though I do not agree with them about a number of things.  Our specific disagreement over the so-called Transformation Problem is rather technical, but at the risk of losing everyone but Chris, I will spend a few paragraphs explaining what is at stake.

I have argued in my published writings on Marx and also on this blog that in CAPITAL, Volume I, Marx assumes equal organic composition of capital, only relaxing this assumption in Volumes II and III.  Since Ricardo's version of the Labor Theory of Value is correct only under this severe constraint [as Ricardo himself was aware], this assumption allows Marx to focus on what he considers the more fundamental question that Ricardo cannot answer even in the special case in which his theory is true, namely why there is a positive rate of profit in a capitalist economy.  Marx then introduces his distinction between labor and labor power to solve the problem, demonstrating thereby that capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class.

Mathematically speaking, the arguments by which the various propositions of Volume I are demonstrated -- at least on my interpretation of the book -- presuppose that competition establishes a uniform rate of profit throughout the economy.  It is this assumption that yields the conclusion that input and output prices are identical for a given commodity.  This way of analyzing things, which Kliman correctly labels a "simultaneous" approach, is widely adopted in the large international literature written by contemporary mathematical economists interested in casting Marx's arguments in modern dress.  I am a big fan of this approach.

However, there is an alternative way of reading Volume I.  If you give up the assumption that competition equilibrates the system by establishing a single economy-wide profit rate, then you can represent Marx's analysis as approaching such a uniform profit rate over time by way of a series of adjustments on the part of capitalists to the information presented by the market.  In that analysis, input and output prices are not identical.  This is not a simultaneous analysis, but a temporal analysis. 

But I believe that the end result of these two modes of analysis is the same.  The same relationships emerge between labor values and prices, and the same divergences of prices from labor values appear, which must be explained and analyzed by the same arguments that Marx invokes in Volume III.  So I do not see how adopting Kliman's approach alters, in the end, our understanding either of capitalist economies or of Marx's text.

The second question, on which I am afraid I have nothing at all to say, is the dispute over Marx's claim that there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as more capital intensive techniques are introduced.  I would have to read, or else watch on video, Kliman's analysis of that dispute, and I just have not done so yet.

Chris, I hope this at least demonstrates that I take your comments seriously, even if I am not now in a position to respond to them fully.

[BAD] MUSIC TO MY EARS

When I was a boy, the gold standard in choruses was the 360 member Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  This was, as the name suggests, the choir of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it seemed to consist of every able-bodied non-tone-deaf Mormon within a one hundred mile radius of the Tabernacle.  Pictures of the choir [no television in those days] showed banks upon banks of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses, standing on risers that seemed, like Jacob's Ladder, to ascend to the heavens.  Although the choir clearly equated numbers with musical power, it was a rather odd fact that as a musical group, they did not make that joyous a noise.  Rather, they produced a muddy, indistinct sound that seemed to be coming from a cathedral bedeviled by inconvenient echoes.

This odd contradiction between the sheer size of the choir and its rather mediocre musical power was a consequence of a simple fact about the generation of sound waves familiar to anyone who has ever sat in front of an old monitor watching a sine wave rise and fall across the screen.  Sound, of course, is generated by the agitation of the gas particles in the air.  It travels in a series of expansions and contractions that are nicely visualized by those old sine waves.  When you add a second sine wave to the first, it can either match the first perfectly, in which case the combination is augmented by the addition of the two magnitudes, or it can conflict with the first, in which case the interference of the two waves diminishes the combined sound.  The Mormon Tabernacle singers, numbered though they were in the hundreds, were not, if the truth be told, very good singers.  They did not all sing on key [or even, or so it seemed to me, in the same key], and their entrances and exits were ragged.  As a result, the sound waves generated by their vibrating uvulae interfered with one another, producing what I can only describe as a brown sound.

The truth of this observation was brought home to me powerfully one evening in the late 40's [I was still in high school] when I attended a concert at Town Hall in Manhattan by the newly formed Robert Shaw Chorale.  Shaw was a dynamic young conductor with radically new ideas about what a professional chorus ought to be.  When the Chorale came out on stage, I was astonished to see that there were no more than twenty or so of them.  I was sitting in the peanut gallery, of course, and I began to worry about whether I would be able to hear them.  The singers, all hand-picked professionals, did not group themselves into sections -- sopranos, altos, tenors, basses -- as was the universal practice at that time.  Instead, they lined up in several ranks man-woman-man-woman-man-woman.  What is more, instead of being bunched tightly together so that each one's left shoulder seemed welded to the next right shoulder,  they spaced themselves perhaps two or three feet from one another.  It was clear that Shaw had some very unorthodox ideas about choral singing.

When they opened their mouths to sing the first notes of the first composition, a blast of sound filled Town Hall, as audible to me near the back of the second balcony as it must have been to the toffs in the expensive seats in the orchestra section.  The reason for this astonishing power, of course, was that the singers were all perfectly in tune and perfectly synchronized with one another.  Their spacing, which succeeded brilliantly in blending the different voices, was made possible by the fact that it was not necessary to group all the sopranos near the one or two of their section who could be counted on to find the pitch at an entrance or pick up a conductor's cue.  Compare, if you will, the playing of  a fine string quartet with that of a mediocre orchestra.

These thoughts crossed my mind this morning as I reflected on the odd failure of Romney's super-pac multi-millions to achieve any measurable success in the campaign against president Obama.  Why, I wondered, were the vast sums of which Democrats were so fearful having so little impact on the race?  Then I thought about Shaw and the Tabernacle Choir, and I saw what might be an answer.

The Romney campaign, it occurred to me, is suffering from the advertising equivalent of the self-defeating interference of the sound waves issuing from choruses like the Tabernacle Choir.  The Romney campaign is producing what psychologists, reaching for the same analogy, call cognitive dissonance.  Since North Carolina is considered a "battleground state," our television viewing is repeatedly interrupted by political thirty second spot ads.  The Romney campaign started out pillorying Obama as Other, un-American, out of touch with American values, a Socialist [I wish!].  But that did not seem to have any negative impact on his poll numbers, which most strikingly revealed that Americans like the President, even when they disagree with him.  Apparently cautioned by this evidence that their efforts to make Americans fear and hate Obama were not working, the campaign did an almost complete about face.  Now, the ads feature a syrupy voice saying that although Obama is a nice guy, he is in over his head, and unable to deal with America's problems.  The effect of these two series of ads, I thought, is rather like the effect of having the altos in a chorus singing slightly off key or out of synch with one another.  The sound waves interfere with each other, producing a muddy sound of no great power.

The same result is produced by the campaign's constant shifts in its positions on such issues as "pre-existing conditions" in health care reform or a voucher system to replace Medicare.  Political junkies, like music mavens, might be able to disambiguate the conflicting messages conveyed by the Romney campaign's ads, but the general public, like the audience at a concert of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, just hears a blurred sound of no particular direction or distinction.

I think they would have had more success with a sharp, precise, clean message, however unfamiliar to the ear.  Better a good performance of Pierrot Lunaire than a blurred rendering of the Messiah.