MACROS AND PCS CONCLUSION

Ever since Karl Marx introduced it in his early essay, "On The Jewish Question," ideological critique has been the rhetorical weapon of choice of the left. Marx himself went on, in his mature writings, to expose the covert interests at the heart of classical economic theory, managing, in Capital, to discover ideological bias even in the mathematics of Smith, Ricardo, Nassau Senior, and their fellow rationalizers of capitalism. When I was young, I was awed by the depth with which left critics could penetrate the surface of social and economic relations to expose the exploitation, inequality, privilege, and self-justification that lay beneath. By comparison, even the most superficially quick-witted and mathematically adept apologists for capitalism were shallow, one dimensional, and utterly lacking in self-awareness.

Now, to my dismay, I find that those with whom I am allied on the left all too often exhibit precisely these defects of intellect, insight, self-understanding, and language.  In high school Biology, we studied the autonomic nervous system by means of a particularly brutal bit of by-play with frogs. It seems that if you stick a sharp pointed object into a frog's eye and grind it around until the frog's brain is utterly destroyed, certain of its reflex responses continue to function. This is called "pithing" a frog. After the frog has been pithed, you can produce a contraction of the frog's leg by dropping a bit of acid on it. The response shows that the contraction of the leg is governed by the autonomic nervous system, centered, as I recall, in the spinal column somewhere, rather than in the brain. When I listen to speakers putatively on the left these days, I sometimes think they have been pithed, and that their speech is actually a function of their autonomic nervous system.

I hope no one will be so foolish as to suppose that these remarks constitute a brief for right-wing discourse. Anyone who listens for even a short while to the mindless repetition of incantations to free markets, democracy, and the dangers of political extremism - by which is meant anything even slightly to the left of Bill Clinton - will know that ideological rationalizations of the established order are alive, well, and awaiting a devastating ideological critique. But that critique cannot possibly be mounted by those who have lost all sensitivity to the ritual and unreflective character of their own discourse.  One of the lessons Marx teaches us in Capital is that when we wish to anatomize some practice or social formation with which we are confronted, it is invaluable to remind ourselves of its history. In an effort to understand, and thereby perhaps to counteract, the triviality and shallowness of so much contemporary left discourse, I shall try in a very few words to recapitulate the sequence of steps by which, like the powerful wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, Marx has been reduced from a world-shattering necromancer to a sideshow conjuror doing cheap dialectical tricks to scare intellectual children.

 The central fact of social life is the appropriation, by a ruling class, of a surplus of goods they have not produced, both for their own enjoyment and in order to reinforce their ability to continue the appropriation. This appropriation takes many institutional forms - kingship, slavery, conquest, taxation, serfdom - but always it is backed by force, and always it consists in the taking by one group of men and women of the food, clothing, shelter, and other goods that the labor of another group of men and women has produced. In a capitalist economy, appropriation takes the specific form of the exploitation of legally free wage labor by capital.  The unequal allocation of the social product is immediately obvious to anyone with eyes to see: some people live in hovels, others in castles, or condominiums. Some people eat rice and beans, others eat meat and fish. Some die unattended of diseases that medicine can cure, others are ushered out of this life as comfortably as armies of doctors and nurses can manage.

Contrary to the mythology of celebratory historiography, those whose labor is being appropriated almost always know perfectly well what is happening to them, even in that most mystified of all social formations, capitalism. But the rationalizations by which rulers justify their appropriations do, nevertheless, play some role in sustaining the structure of inequality. The task of ideological critique is to expose the self-interest that lurks below the surface of those rationalizations, and in that way to cripple the rationalizers. So it is that Marx devoted endless pages to attacks on the major and minor theorists of classical political economy, even though he believed that the assault on the central keep of the capitalist fortress would be led by organized workers, not their allies from the left intelligentsia. In the early part of this century, it was still possible to hope that the working class of the industrialized world would replace capitalist irrationality and injustice with the rationality and justice of socialism, but three world-historical events - the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Great Depression - put paid to that happy optimism. The willingness of the several national components of the international working class to take up arms against one another, the appearance of a pre-capitalist dictatorship masquerading as socialism, and the success of capitalism in surviving the great crash that Marx had predicted, together sank the hopes that had buoyed the early revolutionary movement.

In response to these reverses and disappointments, radical intellectuals elaborated ever more subtle theories of hegemony, ideology, mass communication, and the mysteries of  discourse, all in a desperate attempt to explain why their generous offers of leadership elicited so few followers.  Eventually, the discourse of radicals lost all relation to the material base of social theory, to the fundamental facts of exploitation, appropriation, and inequality, so that we were left with an empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution into which literary and aesthetic concerns could be poured. In the wonderful phrase of Alexander Pope, referring in the Dunciad to his rivals among the Augustan poets, the discourses of our contemporary radicals have become "shit to airy fineness spun."

With no conception of the material basis of exploitation and inequality, with no way of making that fundamental distinction between appearance and reality on which all true ideological critique rests, the invocation of such phrases as "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is little more than a shibboleth, a test of politically correct pronunciation, passage of which admits one to a clique of uncritically one-dimensional flatlanders. The subject of these remarks is power and discourse - not how to control the power of discourse, or undermine the power of discourse, or apologize for the power of discourse, but how to recover the power of radical discourse, to make such discourse once again a weapon in the struggle against inequality and exploitation.

The prerequisite to that recovery, I suggest, is a refusal to invoke the macros of speech without thought. "Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is to the 1990's what "running dogs of imperialism" and "capitalist lackeys" were to the 1930's. Now, there really were, in the 30's, nasty, unprincipled underlings who did the dirty work of the imperial capitalist nations, just as there are today. When first coined, the metaphors "running dogs" and "lackeys" captured rather vividly both the function and the moral degradation of those despicable people [assuming, for the moment, that one accepts the rather unjustifiably negative view of the dog.] But after endless, and eventually mindless, repetition, they lost their capacity to enlighten, and instead became obstacles to thought.

In like manner, racism  is an integral component of American society, sexism is a structural feature of almost all societies, disdain for the poor [which, I assume, is what is 'meant by "classism"] has been endemic among the wealthy and privileged of European and American society for centuries, and homophobia is manifestly a widespread pathology. But "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," like so many other unreflective utterances of the putatively progressive, is an impediment to thought, not a tool of ideological critique. It is as devoid of critical content as that right-wing oxymoron, "the free market."

Perhaps this is merely the crotchety complaint of a sixty-year old radical who finds that, as usual, the young are listening to a different music and singing a different song. But I am convinced that we have never had a greater need for the destructive unmasking of entrenched and rationalized interests, for ideological critique as Marx first conceived and practiced it. Perhaps the next generation of PC's will come with a resident program that responds to stereotyped, one-dimensional language with the error message, "Warning: words without meaning; please pause and reflect."

SIC TRANSIT

Brian Leiter's blog tells me that Israel Scheffler passed away yesterday at the age of ninety-one.  Many, many others knew him far better than I, and will, I am sure, have a good deal to say about this wise and very sweet man.  I should like to add one personal story now just sixty-one years old.  In the late Fall of 1952 I found myself in a rather difficult bind.  I was a senior at  Harvard, supposedly writing an honors thesis for graduation.  Since I was going through Harvard in three years, I needed the two semesters of "tutorial for credit" to complete the thirty-two courses required for the degree, and this credit was awarded only if one actually wrote a thesis.  But I had flamed out in my effort to write a logic thesis with Hao Wang, and was casting about desperately for a manageable topic.  Morton White suggested I write a thesis on Gilbert Ryle's new book, Concept of Mind, which I had just read in a course on Analytic Philosophy with White.  I got to it earnestly, and quickly produced fifty pages or so.  But having let Wang down, I did not feel that I could go back to him with this trivial topic totally outside his areas of interest, so I was on my own.

Is Scheffler was then teaching, if memory serves, in the Harvard School of Education, but he had close ties to the Philosophy Department.  Quite spontaneously, he offered to step in and serve as my de facto thesis advisor.  He read what I had written, made some helpful suggestions, and in general saw me through a difficult period.  It was an extremely generous thing for him to do -- a true supererogatory act, to use a term that has gone out of circulation -- and I have always been very grateful.  I was then too young to appreciate how unusual such an offer was at Harvard in those days [I was barely nineteen], but I did have enough wit to recognize that Is Scheffler was a kind, thoughtful, and thoroughly decent man.  He will be missed.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Today, as promised, I initiate what will be an occasional series of repeat posts, reprising essays I have previously posted of which I am inordinately fond.  My motivation is entirely narcissistic, and is not prompted by even a single request from my readers.  I conceive of myself as a writer, not as a blogger [though recent evidence might count against me in that regard], and once I have shaped my thoughts into a formal essay or book, I think of the product not as episodic and evanescent, but rather as a permanent contribution to The Great Conversation.  One of the paradoxes of The Cloud is that it both preserves every thought one has ever blogged or tweeted or texted and also, by that very fact, reduces everything one has written to the status of ephemera.  Think of this series of repeat posts as my futile effort to sweep back the tide.

Today, I re-post the first half of an essay I wrote, in despair, after a difficult meeting of a graduate seminar.  The second half will appear tomorrow.  It has never been formally published.

Macros and PC's:

                                 A Last-Ditch Attempt to Salvage Ideological Critique

[Editorial note:  this was written twenty years ago.  Now, of course, I use WORD]

I am one of those dinosaurs who still use Wordstar as a word processing program. In the Wordstar program there is a utility that permits a user to define a macro - that is to say, a series of characters associated with a single one or two stroke command. When I have finished writing a letter, for example, I simply press "Escape-C." On the screen appears "tab, tab, tab, Sincerely yours, comma, return, return, return, tab, tab, tab, Robert Paul Wolff." Another macro command prints out "tab, tab, tab, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy," and yet a third produces "tab, tab, tab, University of Massachusetts, Amherst."  This Macro utility is a great convenience to me. It permits me to produce a standardized bit of text without mistakes and without much thought. I have ten or twelve such macros stored somewhere in the Wordstar program.

I often think that George Orwell would have been quite delighted by the phenomenon of the macro, had he lived long enough to see it. In his great essay, "Politics and the English Language," written in 1946, Orwell, you will recall, talks about the corruption of political thought and language that is manifested in the mindless repetition of standardized phrases. He gives lots of examples, such as "a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind," and "bloodstained tyranny," and "achieve a radical transformation," and "leaves much to be desired." Had he written the essay only a few years later, he could have added "the free world," and "communist dictatorship," and perhaps "tax and spend liberal." He would have enjoyed the idea of politicians - or their speech writers - programming these and other phrases into their computers as macros, so that they could be produced by a single keystroke or two with no thought whatsoever. We Kant scholars have some rather specialist cant phrases for which macros might be appropriate - my favorite is "conditions of the possibility of experience in general."

These reflections were prompted, several semesters ago, by an incident in a seminar I was teaching on ideological critique. The participants were a group of extremely intelligent and widely read graduate students - all impeccably radical. Despite my heroic efforts to focus their attention on particular, concrete examples, such as the controversy that has developed among ethnographers of the northern Kalahari desert, the students persisted in speaking and writing in the most suffocatingly abstract and stereotypical fashion. Things finally blew up when one member of the class, making a class presentation, referred in passing to "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia." The phrase rolled off his tongue as though the individual words were simply syllables of one great polysyllable - stuck together by some sort of syntactical glue. Everyone in the class was quite comfortable with the phrase. It seemed to me that they found it reassuring, rather in the way little children snuggle down in bed when they hear "Once upon a time." All except a rather abrasive German student who interrupted to protest that she, for one, had nothing against classism.  Indeed, she said, she regularly judged people according to their economic class, and thought it quite the right way to go about things.  The class came to a dead halt, and no one knew what to say. None of the students had ever heard anyone question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," used as a term of opprobrium. It was as though, in the middle of a class preparing little Catholic boys and girls for First Communion, a smart-mouthed trouble maker had piped up and said, "I can take the Father and the Son, but you can keep the Holy Ghost."

I pounced on the intervention - as the French have taught us to call it when a student says something in class - and did everything I could to make it the occasion for a searching examination of unacknowledged ideological presuppositions. That was, after all, the subject matter of the course. But it was a total flop. I simply couldn't get the students to see how mind-numbingly banal, how drained of all genuine thought, that phrase had become. I could not even get them to attune their ears to the ugliness of it as language.  Freud says somewhere, talking about the dynamics of psychoanalytic therapy, that if there is a single topic that it is not permitted to examine in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that topic. I have always found this a profound insight into what happens in the classroom as well.  A classroom in which it is socially or pedagogically unacceptable to question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is a classroom in which neither real teaching nor real learning can take place. It is like a classroom at a Catholic university in which teachers are free to explore every conceivable subject - except the legitimacy of abortion. It is like the huge introduction to neo-classical economics at Harvard, presided over by former Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors Martin Feldstein, who announced, when he returned from his duties in Washington, that the purpose of the course was to teach that the market works - not how it works, mind you, but that it works. 

There are a number of ways in which an orthodoxy can be imposed on a classroom.  The most obvious, and hence the least dangerous, is by administrative fiat. Considerably more dangerous, because harder to spot and to confront, is the quiet, tacit social pressure that enshrines certain ways of thinking as correct, stigmatizing deviations as morally reprehensible and unworthy of serious consideration. I have come to think of this as macro-thinking. By one of the ironies of modern discourse, this pre-programming of thought masquerades as ideological critique, when in fact it is the precise opposite. 

Ideological critique is the demonstration that a putatively value-neutral and objective description of the world actually conceals a thoroughly interested distortion of reality in the service of some powerful social or economic group. As Karl Mannheim shows us in Ideology and Utopia, the critique of a text as ideological is a hostile and aggressive attempt not merely to refute the thesis advanced by the text but also to discredit the author of the text as dishonest, disingenuous, covertly exploitative and manipulative. In the polite world of intellectual combat, where ink rather than blood is spilled, the accusation of ideology is the verbal equivalent of a shotgun blast. Deployed by the weak against the strong, it can be an equalizer, righting somewhat the force imbalance that characterizes unjust societies. 

FURTHER THOUGHTS [MY STOMACH IS STILL EMPTY, ALAS]

I had planned to start today a selective re-posting of a number of essays that have appeared here over the past five years, inasmuch as it has been brought to my attention that there are actually visitors to this blog who have not read every word I have ever written [bizarre, I know, but apparently true.]  But that can wait for a bit.  Today I shall respond to the first two extended comments on yesterday's blog post.

To Michael:  You are quite right to emphasize the explosive growth of the financial sector and its fundamental strangeness.  In a world awash in uninvested capital looking for a home, it is very difficult to remember that human well-being depends on the real economy -- that is, on the production or provision of goods and services -- rather than on the tabulation of monetary value.  We are, as a world society, more than capable of producing enough goods and real services [education, health care, entertainment, and so forth] to provide a decent existence for all seven billion people.  What is more, we could do that without vastly enriching a small number of investors and financial manipulators.  To be sure, we very much need efficient and strongly motivated managers of productive enterprises, but that is entirely another matter.

The fundamental irrationality of our present economic system -- capitalism -- is evidenced by the fact that alongside those who cannot find a job are others working too hard and for too many hours.  It is obviously theoretically possible to shorten the hours and lighten the work load on those employed and then to enlist the unemployed to take their places on the production lines or in the offices.  The obstacle to such an arrangement is not that it would be inefficient but that it would be unprofitable.

A propos, the story is told of the great conservative economist Milton Friedman that he was visiting a South American country and was taken to a showcase government construction project.  When he asked why the men were using shovels rather than earthmoving equipment, it was explained that this was a job-creating project.  "Then why not have them use spoons then?"  Friedman asked.  This was a witty reply, intended to reveal the irrationality of using anything less than the most efficiently labor-saving technology.  But in fact there is a perfectly good answer.  Let us suppose that the purpose of an economy is to provide for human well-being rather than to make profits [an unacceptably radical assumption, I know, but bear with me.]  Let us suppose also [this is a very important assumption, and not at all to be taken for granted] that active, effortful, productive participation in the collective economic activities of the society is a positive human good, not a painful human necessity imposed by the harsh realities of life.  [I am here borrowing from Marx's discussion of alienated labor, as true aficionados will instantly recognize.]  In that case, working some people too hard and giving a part of their output to those who are unemployed in the form of welfare benefits is inferior as a set of social arrangements to sharing the work around so that everyone participates and everyone is adequately supported.  [I urge those of you who wish to pursue this line of analysis to take a look at the first chapter of David Schweickart's fine early book, Capitalism or Worker Control.]

Thus far, I have simply been indulging in what Marx bitingly and with good reason called Utopian Socialism -- which is to say, speculation about better ways of arranging things not grounded in an adequate analysis of the present situation and without any notion of what forces now at work in society could realistically lead to something resembling that imagined alternative future.  Two developments are required to translate these fantasies into a plan of action.  The first, which I have explored in my essay "The Future of Socialism," is transformations within the structure and organization of capitalist enterprises that make coherent, efficient large-scale economic planning materially possible, indeed actual.  As I argued in that essay, these transformations are well underway in the largest capitalist enterprises, driven not by ideology but by capitalist necessity.  The second [which Marx wrongly though would be produced by the first -- see the Manifesto] is the mobilization of the great majority of workers of all sorts behind a demand for a subordination of capitalist enterprises to the general will [if Rousseau will forgive me.]  It is because I understand the necessity of this second development that I keep sniffing the wind and taking heart from every sign, however evanescent, that that great beast, The People, is arousing itself and is slouching toward Jerusalem.

To GT Christie:  "the ordinary worker (including the university educated worker) is becoming superfluous."  That is a profound and deeply troubling truth.  The outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs is almost complete, but the outsourcing or obsolescence of "white collar" jobs is also under way.  All of us are familiar with the rather unsettling experience of speaking to a man or woman in India when we call the customer service of a credit card company or an insurance provider.  But equally odd is the discovery that an x-ray or MRI administered in an American hospital may be read by a perfectly competent but much cheaper medical technician ten thousand miles away.  There are relatively few jobs that require the actual physical presence of an employee in immediate proximity to the customer.  What is more -- and it is this, I think, that GT was getting at -- more and more decent jobs with adequate salaries are being replaced by automated systems.  Only those of us who are really old can recall when operators, rather than switching machines, directed our calls.  If Jeff Bezo's latest dream pans out, the endless variety of things we all order from Amazon.com will be delivered by drones rather than by UPS drivers in brown shorts.

Well, enough for today.  I must go to the store.  I am all out of raw carrots.

DEEP THOUGHTS ON AN EMPTY STOMACH

It has often been observed that when the body is afflicted, one's sphere of awareness constricts.  Confined to bed by an illness, sensitivity to the slightest changes in your body expands and events beyond your home, or your  room, or even beyond the bed itself dwindle in importance.  Indeed, Eric Goldstein [later Eric Cassel], the boy my sister's age who lived across the back driveway from us in the housing development in which I grew up, reported in a professional publication, written when he had become Dr. Eric Cassel, that patients after general anaesthesia regress for a while in their cognitive capabilities to the level of young children, as originally measured by the Swiss psychologist jean Piaget.  [Piaget's tests of cognitive development involved asking children of different ages to perform such tasks as comparing the amount of water in a tall thin glass with the amount in a short fat glass.  Cassel's conclusion, which seems eminently reasonable, was that you should not ask patients still in the Recovery Room to make adult decisions about such things as inheritances or further medical care.]

Since returning from Paris, I have been on an extremely strict diet in a desperate effort to lose fifteen pounds or more over a stretch of eight weeks.  Today is the end of the first two weeks, and I must in all candor confess that anything less than a nuclear war cannot at this moment command my full adult attention.  My day is filled with deliberations about the dangers of a dill pickle.  Yesterday while munching a raw carrot, I asked my wife in all seriousness whether she had ever seen a fat rabbit.

In an effort to combat this decline into solipsism, I should like today to broach a very large subject on which I have been brooding for a long time.  I do not have clearly formed views about it, nor am I sufficiently knowledgeable about it to have any confidence in my intuitions.  But I have no doubt at all of its importance, and perhaps I can stimulate some discussion on this blog that we would all find helpful.  You will forgive me if I pause from time to time as I write to nibble a lettuce leaf or indulge in a grape.  [I am reminded of the lovely moment in Act One, Scene One of Cyrano de Bergerac in which the impecunious but fiercely proud Cyrano makes a meal of a few grapes, a sip of water, and half a macaroon.  This is, by the bye, another example of the observation in my last post about the role the web plays as an extension of memory.  I am of course quite unable to quote the play by heart, but I had enough of a recollection of the bit of dialogue to find it in an on-line version of Cyrano in a few moments.]

The question, to put it as simply as I can, is this:  How are we to understand the dramatic increase in economic inequality in America and what, if anything, can we do about it?  The broad outlines of the facts are quite well known, and have become, I am happy to say, the subject of constant comment in the public conversation.  America is now almost the most economically unequal of the fully developed industrial nations and it exhibits as well virtually the lowest level of socio-economic mobility.  [For a very useful summary of the data in a NY TIMES column co-authored by my old friend and former UMass colleague Samuel Bowles, go to this link: 

The proximate causes are well known:  the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, the successful assault on union rights, the failure of regulatory oversight, the explosive growth of the financial sector, the repeated cuts in tax rates for upper incomes.  Can we put these factors in some larger or more general frame of reference?

As is so often true, I find it helpful to go back to Marx.  Although he could not have foreseen in any detail what capitalism has become, his insights were nonetheless penetrating because he was looking at its birth and early youth.  Four thoughts come to mind when I once again view capitalism through his eyes.

First, the driving force of capitalism is the ceaseless quest for profit, for the augmentation of capital.  "Accumulate, accumulate!  That is Moses and the prophets," he says in a famous passage.  Capitalism is not driven by greed nor is it driven by the desire of the executors of capitalist enterprises for self-indulgent gratification.  Lord knows, there is more than enough of that, but as Max Weber taught us, capital accumulation can even be accompanied by, indeed is facilitated by, the paradoxical self-denial of those guided by a secular Puritanism.

Second, the augmentation of profits compels capitalists to seek ever cheaper labor, for labor is a major cost of production and, unlike the prices of other factor inputs, wages are variable and can with effort be driven down.  The familiar justifications for low wages and the shredding of the social safety net are ex post ideological rationalizations, not genuine reasons for the relentless efforts of capitalism to cheapen labor.  This effort to drive down wages can for a time be weakened or even halted by labor shortages, by the collective opposition of organized labor, or by the actions of a government for the moment influenced by the voting power of the workers.  But the maintenance of high wages is, for capitalism, an unacceptable and unstable compromise, not an equilibrium that can be sustained indefinitely.

Third, the cheapening of labor exposes a contradiction in capitalism [as we used to say in the old days], for in any rapidly expanding capitalist system, the principal source of market demand is the wages of laborers.  Indeed, in some of the simpler and more elegant formal models of a capitalist economy, both of the Marxian and the neo-classical sort, final demand by capitalists and their beneficiaries for luxury goods is non-existent.  In any event, even the most blatantly self-indulgent "masters of the universe" with their yachts and private planes and elevator-serviced mansions and multi-million dollar weddings account for only a tiny fraction of the Gross Domestic Product.  Hence, by driving down wages, Capital is depriving itself of buyers for its goods, and hence of profits.

Fourth, in its contradictory quest for cheap labor and effective consumer demand, Capital has historically pursued two policies which for generations served it quite well:  The enlistment of a work force even poorer and more desperate than its domestic labor supply and the opening up, by the force of the state if necessary, of new markets.  Hence outsourcing and colonialism, including their modern variant, neo-liberal economic policies.

There is a limit to the unending movement of capitalist enterprises to nations with even cheaper labor:  Eventually, one would think, Capital will run out of pre-capitalist enclaves in which pools of cheap and desperate labor can still be found.  I am reminded of this extraordinarily prescient passage by David Ricardo, written almost two hundred years ago, in the extraordinary chapter "On Wages" in his 1817 magnum opus, The Principles of Political Economy.  "An English labourer would consider his wages under their natural rate, and too scanty to support a family, if they enabled him to purchase no other food than potatoes, and to live in no better habitation than a mud cabin; yet these moderate demands of nature are often deemed sufficient in countries where 'man's life is cheap', and his wants easily satisfied."  [Ricardo, Chapter v.]   Quite clearly, we are nowhere near the limit of the benefits to Capital of the search for cheaper labor, although it is perhaps possible to see that terminus now as a possible future in which, at long last, a world-wide shortage of labor will begin to drive wages back up.

But at the same time, there is another development under way that threatens to make even that distant hope a mirage.  As Paul Krugman has recently noted [but this time Google lets me down -- I cannot find it], advances in robotics are reducing the amount of human labor required for production -- this is called an increase in "labor productivity" -- so that in America today [America understood as including the scores of millions of workers overseas who work for American enterprises] there are increasing numbers of human beings who are simply superfluous.  They persist in hanging around, they eat food and sleep somewhere or other and wear clothes and use medical resources at some level or other, but they really are not needed by Capitalism, not even is a Reserve Army of the Unemployed.  The rational and humane response to this fact would of course be to cut the length of the workday, share the jobs around, and pay everyone a more than living wage.  The economy is materially productive enough to accomplish this easily.  But it would not be profitable.  Hence no serious person even considers it.

Well, there are as many thoughts as I can put down on an empty stomach.  I invite thoughtful comments of any length.

CROWD SOURCING WORKS

Thank you all.  It is indeed H. L. Hunt.

Here is an interesting question that I am sure many have written about:  I know a number of things that I cannot at the moment recall, but with enough effort I can retrieve many of them from my memory.  For example, sometimes I cannot recall Donald Sutherland's name even though I can tell you the movies he was in and what he looks like.  There are also countless things I do not know and perhaps have never known that I can retrieve from Google in much less time than it takes me to recall one of the things I do know, such as, say, the capital of South Dakota.  Why should I not consider that vast store of information part of what I know? 

MORE VIOLA NOODLING FOR JERRY FRESIA

Jerry, the various items I removed are all unattached to the main body of the viola, save by friction and such.  The strings are wound around the pegs [top of the photo] and attach to that darker wedge shaped piece at the bottom either by being inserted through slots in the wedge shaped piece [the strings have metal knobs on the end that catch and hold the string in place] or by a little loop, in the case of the A string, farthest to the right in the picture, which loops over the manual adjustment knob.  [To tune the viola, you either rotate the pegs to loosen or tighten the string, making it lower or higher in tone, or you rotate the knob for the A string, same principle.]  The wedge shaped piece itself is attached by a loop [which you cannot see] to the bottom of the viola, where there is a knob.  It is held in place by tension.  The bridge -- the thin light colored piece of wood that the strings go over -- is held down onto the viola by pressure from the tightened strings.  The man who made my viola -- Marten Cornellissen -- very kindly puts little marks on the surface of his violins and violas to mark exactly where the feet of the bridge are to sit.  The chin rest -- black think, lower left -- is held onto the viola by a clamp that you cannot see in the picture, but which fits to the underneath side of the viola.  Two adjustable rods tighten to hold it in place.  I just inserted a very thin metal rod in holes in the sides of the columns and turned them to loosen the chin rest until it came off easily.  This fact about the construction of the chin rest allows a violist to adjust the precise place where it is set on the viola -- same thing for a violin.  Note, by the way, that baroque violin and viola players do not use chin rests.  They also use baroque bows and gut strings, and the combination of these two differences results in a softer sound, quite different from the brilliant sound of a modern violin or viola with metal wound strings and a modern high tension bow.

When all of those various pieces had been removed, what remained was just my viola itself, which I then polished with a soft cloth and a very little bit of Mr. Hill's varnish cleaner.  The challenge came in reassembling it all, which took me a good deal of time and much angst.

By the way, since we are deep in the weeds here, all violins are the same size but not all violas are.  They vary in the length of the body [the lovely amber colored main part], from as small as 15 3/4 inches to as much as 17 inches or even -- lord help us -- 17 1/2 inches.  I play a 16 inch viola, which is considered small.  I stand in awe of those who can play 16 1/2 or 17 inch violas.  If you want to sound really knowledgeable, ask a violist after a concert whether he or she plays a sixteen and a half or a seventeen.