LO, WHAT LIGHT FROM YONDER WINDOW BREAKS?

As all of you know, I have been extremely eager to find something, anything, to do to counter the threat posed by Trump.  When some former members of Bernie’s campaign started OurRevolution, I gave a thousand dollars, and called the DC office to find out what I could do to help.  No response, no one at the DC phone, nothing.  I was very depressed.  But OurRevolution kept sending me appeals for money, which I just deleted from my InBox. 

Finally, yesterday, in exasperation, I responded with a brief message.  I wrote, “You keep asking for money.  When are you going to DO something?”  I received this reply:

“Professor Wolff,

I know it doesn't look like it, but we actually are working hard on several projects I am personally excited about. First, we're researching and building a tool to allow folks to get involved in leadership in Dem and Working Families Party positions at their local level - you can check out our progress so far at transformtheparty.com. We've got teams of volunteers and staffers working hard on this. Right now the search tool only works for California addresses but we're almost ready to launch the whole shebang. Second, we're working on a sanctuary cities project that we plan to use to pressure additional cities to become havens for those who need protection - and third, we're getting ready to roll out local organizing plans for all 50 states. This is going to be a big deal and has taken lots of time to try to get right - but we expect it to be out within the next few weeks at most.

I certainly understand - and share - your frustrations, but as far as I can tell, and I am looking and bugging hard - we are almost there!

In solidarity,

--
David
Our Revolution Help Desk Volunteer Lead”

This could be big, folks.  Stay tuned.

A BELATED FAREWELL

I was just amusing myself by listening on YouTube to a beautiful performance of Monteverdi's great duet, Zefiro, torna, featuring the hot new French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, when my mind turned to a performance I heard of that piece many, many years ago in Harvard's Sanders theater with Russell Oberlin and a second countertenor [the Jaroussky performance has a soprano as second voice.]  I sat in the second row, looking up at Oberlin on stage, and it may be the closest I will ever get to heaven, considering my scepticism regarding things religious.  Oberlin passed away just five weeks ago, and I neglected to acknowledge the fact at the time.  He will be missed.

It was in that very same venue, Sanders Theater, this time sitting near the back, that I first heard a countertenor.  That time it was Alfred Deller, the first man with a soprano range voice to perform in America.  Deller was not really a true countertenor, but the effect was electric.  I recall that he chose to address the audience directly after singing, I suspect to prove that his speaking voice was in the expected male range.

My other favorite countertenor is my son, Tobias Barrington Wolff, who as a young man studied for a while with a famous singer and actually had a solo in the Student Chorus performance of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

Nowadays there are countertenors all over the place, of course, but I can still recall the thrill that went through the audience in Sanders when Deller first began to sing.  Those, those were the days.

FAMILY MATTERS

I have been very touched by the responses to my comments about my sons.  It is true that my sons are remarkably successful in the public world, and like any Jewish father, I qvell about them whenever I can.  I am reminded that back in 1953, when I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, my mother asked for my Phi Bete key and that of my sister, and had a pair of earrings made from them.  You cannot get any more Jewish Mother-ish than that!

Near the end, I sat with my father in the hospital.  He could not talk, because of a breathing tube required by the Emphysema that killed him, but he could understand what I was saying.  I stroked his head and said, "You have been a better father to me than your father was to you, and that is the most that can be asked of any man.  I will try to be a better father still to my sons."  Then I told him that I loved him.  That night he died.

I can say honestly that my son, Patrick, is a better father to Samuel and Athena than I have been to him, and in my eyes that counts for far more than his Grandmaster triumphs and all the money he has made in business.

A REQUEST FROM JERRY FRESIA

Dear Professor:

I wonder if you would consider posting the petition information below in an effort

to get President Obama to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg.

A recent interview by Amy Goodman with Robert Meeropol (https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/29/sons_of_julius_ethel_rosenberg_ask)

Sons of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg Ask Obama to Exonerate Their Mother in Nuclear Spy Case www.democracynow.org Two brothers are making a last-ditch appeal to President Obama to clear their mother’s name. Michael and Robert Meeropol are calling on Obama to posthumously exonerate their mother, Ethel Rosenberg. She, along with their father, Julius Rosenberg, was charged with conspiring to share nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union and executed on June 19, 1953. At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover accused the couple of committing "the crime of the century." The government alleged the Rosenbergs, along with Morton Sobell, helped the Soviet Union acquire the secret of the atomic bomb. But supporters say there’s no evidence that Ethel Rosenberg took part in espionage. A new report by the Seton Hall School of Law suggests Ethel was used by the government as a pawn for leverage in its attempt to build a case against her husband. We speak to Robert Meeropol, the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. He was six years old at the time of their execution.

explains the current effort to get President Obama to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg. Interestingly, it was Roy Cohn who came up with the idea to prosecute Ethel, knowing she was innocent, in an effort to pressure Julius. And Cohn was close to the senior Trump and a mentor of sorts to our president-elect. So this is the last chance for awhile. They are close to 50,000 signatures but not there quite yet.

At the bottom of this email is text from the petition page. And here is the link to the website where the petition is located:

http://shpg.org/300/161607
Jerry

ONE LAST WORD ON EXPLOITATION

Continuing my pathetic and desperate effort to avoid for one more day talking about Trump, who will, in the year to come, be my principal topic of blogging, let me extend the analysis I have offered in the last two days of the fundamentally exploitative nature of capitalism.  It will have occurred to many of you that my description of the situation of workers, although it may accurately reflect the facts on the ground in 1867, when Capital was published, does not seem to capture much that characterizes modern advanced post-industrial economies today. 

One obvious failing of my portrait of capitalism is that it represents workers as completely bereft of ownership of capital, including even the craft skills and tools that weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and ironmongers traditionally possessed.  By implication, it also represents workers as pretty much reduced to a homogeneous mass of semi-skilled machine operatives.  To be sure, Marx does nod in the direction of class distinctions within the working class by saying that skilled labor can be figured as a simple multiple of unskilled labor.  But that clearly does not begin to acknowledge, let alone to analyze, one of the most distinctive features of modern capitalism, namely the sharply pyramidal structure of wealth and income among those who sell their labor for a living, and who therefore qualify as members of the Working Class.

From a formal point of view, a minimum wage burger flipper, a factory worker, a middle manager in a WalMart store, and the CEO of a multi-national corporation are all wage-earners whose labor is exploited by capital, but intuitively it seems that they must occupy different, and in many respects opposed, positions in the class structure of a capitalist economy.  And so they do.

In effect, what happens in modern capitalist economies is that some workers acquire what Gary Becker famously called ”Human Capital,” in the form of knowledge, skill, and educational credentials.  This capital, for such it truly is, permits them both to appropriate a larger portion of what they produce and also frees them to move from sector to sector in the economy, taking with them not merely their bodies [which I ironically refer to as the workers’ capital in my re-analysis of Marx’s theory] but also this acquired capital.

The result, as [then] Marxist economists Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis argued in an old journal article, is a structure of relative exploitation.  Capitalists exploit workers, and workers high up on the income pyramid exploit those lower down.  One of the results of this structure of relative exploitation is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to develop working class solidarity, inasmuch as there are real and irreducible conflicts of interest between segments of what is technically the working class.

By the way, the enormous salaries and bonuses paid to corporate executives are something else.  They are, in effect, thefts of a portion of profits by the managers, taken from the shareholders and paid to themselves.  This is made possible by the structure of modern joint stock corporations.  If the plant manager of a nineteenth century firm were to pocket a chunk of the owner’s profits, he would be thrown in jail.  Today, he is appointed Secretary of State of the United States.

DIVISION OF LABOR

It is absolutely necessary that we keep insisting on the crooked, fascistic nature of the administration about to begin in this country, and I will do my best.  But I find the subject so distressing that I must from time to time retreat into philosophy or economic theory or sheer whimsy to preserve my sanity.  However, my son, Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff, on his FaceBook page takes note of and comments mordantly on all of the horrible things that Trump does and says.  Therefore, those of you who wish to read what the Wolffs have to say about these things on a daily basis are invited to check out my son's FaceBook page.  [I assume you all know how to do this.  FaceBook is used by north of a billion people worldwide.]  Think of it as a family business, like the corner grocery store.

Speaking of FaceBook, Mark Zuckerberg has renounced atheism and declared that he has found God [in some form or other] -- not a great testimonial for religion!

GATHER YE ROSEBUDS WHERE YE MAY

For inspiration, I turn to Karl Marx.  For consolation, I turn to Max Weber.  Let me explain.

Thirty years ago and more, when I was doing research that I hoped would undergird the third and consummatory volume of my projected trilogy on the thought of Marx, the volume that would bring the mathematical thesis of Understanding Marx and the literary antithesis of Moneybags Must Be So Lucky to a satisfactory synthesis, I spent many pleasant hours wandering down such beguiling byways as the theory of cost accounting and the critique of index numbers.  One of my favorite sources of enlightenment and amusement was a series of volumes called The Statistical Abstract of the United States.  The Statistical Abstract, which appears annually, is a big fat book of more than five hundred pages consisting entirely of tables of data on every conceivable measurable aspect of American society and economy.  The Abstract is produced by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, as cognoscenti call it, which is located at 2 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, half a mile north of the Capitol.  Although the University of Massachusetts, where I was then teaching, has a mediocre library at best, it is designated a “depository library,” which means that it routinely receives and stores a vast array of official government publications.  In the UMass library stacks I found row on row of Statistical Abstracts, which I could consult but not check out.  [This is long before the digitization of social reality.  Now, of course, all of this available, as they say, online.]  The wealth of information about America contained in these volumes is beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals.  I have often reflected that distinguished European historians of the medieval period would trade the promise of eternal bliss for one page from one volume of, say, The Statistical Abstract of 12^th Century Burgundy.

At one point in my research, having formulated a question for which I had no adequate answer, I conceived the idea of calling the Bureau and asking to speak to someone there who might offer guidance.  The receptionist at the Bureau guided me to the appropriate person, whom I imagined as a chap with rolled-up sleeves and an eyeshade, rather like those gnomes working in the bank in the Harry Potter movies.  We struck up a conversation, and I explained that I was working on a book on the thought of Karl Marx.  To my surprise, he did not hang up, but instead lowered his voice just a bit and replied in a way that made it clear that he was extremely sympathetic to my enterprise.

Why have I told you this story?  Because on this first day of a year that promises to be the worst year of my life, the story gives me a glimmer of hope that things will not be quite as bad as I fear.  It is here that I take consolation from Max Weber, the great theorist of bureaucracy.  The United States government is a vast complex of departments, divisions, and offices staffed, below the very top, by career bureaucrats.  These folks are, by and large, extremely knowledgeable and well educated, and their jobs are protected virtually for life by a Civil Service Administration that, like the telephone company in The President’s Analyst, runs much of the country behind the scenes.  The permanence of the federal bureaucracy is a source of perpetual agita to Democratic presidents who come to Washington eager to implement change, but as Weber makes clear, the inertia of bureaucracies is not ideologically inflected.  It affects conservatives as much as liberals, reactionaries as much as radicals.  And at least some of those hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats are, like my secret friend in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on the left!

It is not much of a straw for grasping, but if we can learn from Grushenka’s parable of the onion in The Brothers Karamazov, perhaps it can pull us all out of hell.