ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF [TO STEAL, YET AGAIN, A NORMAN MAILER PHRASE]

Having managed to complete the NY TIMES crossword puzzle this morning, I idled some time away watching the third lecture on Ideological Critique that I recorded some time ago and put up on YouTube.  In that lecture, as a wrap-up to my exposition of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, I went through his account of the ideology of time-consciousness, which I think is the most brilliant bit of ideological analysis I have ever read.  Then, in the lecture, I offer my own analysis of the ideology of space-consciousness, a natural extension of Mannheim's theory for a Kant scholar like me.  Needless to say, my bit of analysis cannot hold a candle to Mannheim’s but it isn’t bad, and I watched myself with that innocent narcissistic pleasure that an infant gets from contemplating his own feces.

I had totally forgotten the conclusion of the lecture, however.  Without warning, I cut at the very end of the lecture to a clip of the immortal Pete Seeger singing that old union song, “Which Side Are You On?”  I have to tell you, it brought tears to my eyes.  Those were better days, when I was young, despite the evils of segregation, the oppression of women, and the criminalization of gay Americans.

MLESTONES

Today, Susie and I celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary.  In November, I will take note of the anniversary of our first date in 1948, about which I wrote on this blog on August 24, 2015.  On October 6th, I shall fly up to New York to deliver a lecture at Columbia's Heyman Center, my maiden performance as a new member of Columbia's Society of Senior Scholars.  

The date with Susie was an outing to the Thalia Movie House on the Upper West Side, where we saw a revival of the pre-war Marcel Pagnol film, Cesar.  GoogleMaps tells me that the Thalia still exists, now enlarged and rechristened as SymphonySpace.  If there is time, maybe I will walk down to 95th street and take a look at the site of that fateful date sixty-nine years ago. 

Maybe there is something to the theory of Eternal Return.

THE CHAIN OF COMMAND

With startling speed, public commentary about Trump has moved to open expressions of doubt about his mental stability and the threat that this poses to the safety of the world.  A number of cable news commentators have expressed the hope that the generals with whom Trump has surrounded himself – Kelly, Mattis, McMaster – will dissuade him from launching a nuclear attack on North Korea in a fit of pique.  This speculation was given new currency by the dire warnings of James Clapper, an Army Lieutenant General who is recently retired from a seven year stint as Director of National Intelligence.  I think it is important to understand why this speculation is misguided, and why General Clapper is so worried.  The readers of this blog may all understand these matters, but since this is quite literally the most important subject in the world just now, a little repetition will not hurt.

During the Cold War, American military planners believed the nation to be in perpetual danger of a preemptive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union [whether this was true is irrelevant for what I am saying, as will become clear.]  The received scientific wisdom was that there was no defense against such an attack, once launched.  Hence it was essential to deter the Soviet Union from attacking by so arranging America’s nuclear arsenal that it could respond with absolute certainty and reliability to an attack, regardless of the extent of the damage.  Despite the existence of a fleet of American nuclear submarines perpetually on patrol in the world’s oceans, armed with half-megaton missiles capable of being fired with sufficient accuracy to obliterate a Russian city, there were considerations that seemed to American planners to necessitate circumventing the ordinary military chain of command.

Under normal non-nuclear circumstances, when the order to launch an attack of some sort is given by the President in his or her role as Commander in Chief, the order goes to the Secretary of Defense, who conveys it to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in turn conveys it to the Chief of Staff of the appropriate service [Army, Navy, or Air Force], who sends it down to the commander overseeing the unit tasked with the attack, who then communicates the order to the field commander of the men and women actually selected to carry out the attack.  This is the chain of command, and everything in the military rests on it.

But military planners believed that it might prove impossible to rely on this chain of command in the event of a nuclear attack.  They recognized that if the Russian attack came by way of intercontinental ballistic missiles, there would be at most eight or ten minutes between the time when the missile launches were detected by radar and the time when the missiles struck the United States.  This posed a series of problems:

First, the President might be killed, leaving a constitutional vacuum with no settled way to determine who now had the authority to order a counterattack with such weapons as survived the first strike.  Second, key individuals in the chain of command might be killed, disrupting the orderly transmission of a Presidential order.  Third, communications might be interrupted physically or electronically, making it impossible for a lawful launch order actually to reach the missile silo personnel or the Captain of a nuclear submarine.  Fourth, even if a lawful order did reach the military personnel actually in a position to fire the nuclear weapons, it might be impossible for those men and women to double check the order by communicating back to headquarters before carrying out the order.

For all these reasons [and some others besides,] the deliberate decision was made entirely to circumvent the normal chain of command and place at the hand of the President the ability unilaterally to order a nuclear strike immediately and without the chance for second thoughts or countermanding or even slow walking down the chain.  Hence the oft mentioned “nuclear football” containing the launch codes, carried by a uniformed officer who accompanies the President everywhere.  Hence also the training and clear orders to missile silo personnel or nuclear submarine Captains designed to guarantee that once the launch order is received with the proper codes, it will be immediately carried out.

Now, if General Kelly or General McMaster or General Mattis happens to be in the room when Trump decides to launch a nuclear attack, the general can try to dissuade Trump.  He can even go against a lifetime of training and experience and physically try to wrestle Trump to the ground and stop him from giving the order.  But should Trump be alone when he gets it into his head to start a nuclear war, there is nothing between him and the men and women who will actually launch the attack.

General Clapper knows all of this, of course.  That is why he is worried.

A BRIEF NOTE ABOUT AFGHANISTAN

As I have observed before in this space, the Viet Nam War nearly destroyed the U. S. military, forcing the generals to end the draft and move to an all volunteer army.  With the threat of conscription removed, the general populace ceased to care very much about foreign military entanglements.  The cloying practice grew up of saying “Thank you for your service” to anyone in uniform.  It thus became politically possible to commit American troops abroad in an endless series of “wars,” the term now used for projections of power around the globe.  Neither Obama then nor Trump now was compelled to explain to “our brave men and women in uniform” exactly why they are being sent in harm’s way, inasmuch as they are all volunteers.  The fact that the United States created and armed the Taliban to fight against the Russians is neither here nor there.  That is the way an imperial power is supposed to operate.

MORE ON SOCIALISM

Sandwiched in between comments on the eclipse and May-December romances were as number of interesting comments on my socialist musings, to which I should like to respond.  First of all, my apologies to Jerry Brown.   Of course social savings means the allocation of a portion of the annual product to investment.  I was not suggesting that society should build fallout shelters stocked with forty years of groceries.  I am afraid I was just assuming everyone would understand that.  And yes, Howie Berman, there is money, there are art museums [assuming people want them], there will, I should imagine, be small businesses, and perhaps some big ones as well.  Stock markets?  Interesting question.  In a huge, complex economy like that of the United States, there have to be institutional mechanisms for allocating investment capital.  Capital?  Of course.  Without capital, we will all be ranging across the foraging for nuts and berries.

Let me begin by recalling the central point of my essay, “The Future of Socialism.”  [There really is no convenient way to talk about an extremely complex subject without assuming an acquaintance with what one has written previously.  This is not a subject for sound bites.]  I built that essay around Marx’s brilliant insight that new economic formations develop “in the womb of the old.”  I argued that central planning and the substitution of quasi-political decision making for simple response to the workings of the market was happening right now exactly where Marx would have predicted, not in government departments or on collective farms but in the executive offices of great corporations.  This transformation, a necessary precursor to socialism, is, I argued, not a consequence of the brainwashing of corporate executives by their rad-lib Ivy League professors.  It is a transformation demanded by institutional developments within corporations as they internalize decisions that can no longer be made merely by heeding market signals. 

The evolution of capitalism into an economic system suitable for socialism is happening right now.  True socialism cannot be imposed on a capitalist system unprepared for it, any more than mature capitalist production could have been introduced into medieval France by an inspired king.  Whether socialism will replace capitalism is, alas, not inevitable, or even likely, for reasons I outlined in the essay I have several times referenced.  But it is possible.

A second point, derived from my reading of Thomas Piketty’s important book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, about which I wrote and posted a 9,000 word review three years ago.  For reasons that Piketty undertakes to explain, hereditary – or, as he calls it, patrimonial – capitalism has historically been the norm and is reemerging now, after an uncharacteristic retreat in the generation and a half after the two world wars and intervening depression of the twentieth century.  When I ask myself:  What single dramatic step would, more than anything else, move America towards socialism?,  the answer that comes back is:  Impose a 100% inheritance and gift tax on all estates greater than fifty times the median annual income of American households [roughly 2.5 million dollars].  The wealth thus taxed would become the property of the state.  Over not too much time, vast swaths of accumulated capital would be collectively owned and managed.

A response to F. Lengyal’s comment about wage incentives [I apologize for picking and choosing which comments to respond to – there were many worthy of extended replies.]  Let me talk personally about this subject of incentives to work.  [Never mind so-called Game Theory analyses, all of which strike me as simply useless.]  Leaving aside university teaching, which, as Kant says about something else in the Preface to the First Edition of the First Critique, is “rather an amusement than a labour,” I have had a total of four real jobs in my life.  The first, as a sixteen year old high school graduate, was as a waiter in a posh summer camp.  The second, as an eighteen year old after my sophomore year at Harvard, was as a Copy Boy on the old Herald Tribune.  The third, as a nineteen year old college graduate, was as a counselor at a benighted summer camp in Vermont.  And the fourth was my six months in the U. S. Army.  I have never worked in a factory, or in a business office, or in a hospital.  I have never driven a semi, or harvested grapes, or ridden a garbage truck.  So my personal knowledge of the work world is confined to observation.  Here is what I have observed.

Most people work very hard [leaving to one side professors], especially people who earn low wages.  Raising workers’ wages does not lead them to shirk their work, or goof off, or “choose leisure over income.”   For nine years, before moving to a retirement home, my wife and I hired a firm called Molly Maids to clean our apartment every two weeks.  Two women spent the better part of two hours on this job, for which we paid Molly Maids $108.  I asked one of the women how much she made, and she said just under ten dollars an hour.  Since I believe that $15 an hour ought to be the minimum wage, I took to paying each of them ten dollars extra, to bring them up to that minimum.  This was not a tip, it was a wage supplement.  After I started this practice, there was not the slightest change in the character of their work.  If their employer had raised their wages to fifteen dollars an hour, I am absolutely certain they would have done an identical job in every house or apartment they cleaned.  They simply would have made fifty percent more money.

Let me give another counterexample.  Pay in the U. S. military is rigidly determined by rank and years of service in rank [leaving aside housing allowances and some other things of that nature.]  The top pay, for a four-star general with lots of years in grade, is $186,998.40 a year [assuming that I am reading correctly the chart I found on line.]  To reach this rank requires not only a good deal of work but also, almost certainly, service in a war zone, probably a number of war zones, where one can quite easily be blown up or maimed for life.  That is not quite as much as a second year Associate, two years out of law school, makes at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, a big time law firm.  And yet, the U. S. Army is one of the best run, best managed huge conglomerates in the world.  Lord knows, it is better run that Sears, Roebuck, where my first father-in-law served as Vice President of Public Relations for a while.

The talk about incentives, tricked out with pseudo-math or Game Theory gobbledygook, is a transparent ideological rationalization for keeping the wages of workers low so that profits can swell.  I have a great many uncertainties about socialism, but workers goofing off is not one of them.

WHAT WOULD SOCIALISM BE? AN IDLE REFLECION

Inasmuch as I have absolutely nothing at all to say on the matter of Roman Polanski, which seems to be of the very greatest concern to the readers of this blog, I thought I would spend some time, while awaiting the eclipse, musing about what a democratic socialist society might look like.  This is not exactly a matter of pressing concern, needless to say, but it interests me, so I shall spend a few moments on it.  If anyone wants to follow me down this rabbit hole into Wonderland, I would suggest taking the time to read my essay, “The Future of Socialism,” archived at box.net.

I do not have settled views on this matter.  Neither did Marx, of course.  He was dismissive and scornful of the various utopian socialist fantasies floated by his contemporaries, believing, as I understand him, that just as capitalism could not have been foreseen in its details by even the most prescient thinker of the feudal era, so we who are thoroughly entangled in capitalist society can only speculate on what socialism would be, grounding our speculations in a rigorous analysis of the reality of capitalism.  Consider these remarks therefore in the nature of an old man’s schwärmerai.  [Oh, by the bye, even a true democratic socialist state would not be de jure legitimate, as I defined that term in In Defense of Anarchism.  Socialism cannot overcome the contradiction between the autonomy of the individual and the authority claims of the state.  But that is a subject for another day.]

First, some definitions.  By “socialism” I mean an advanced industrial or post-industrial economy and society in which there is collective ownership, management, and control of the principal means of production.  Understood in that way, there are now no socialist societies nor have there ever been any.  By socialism, I do not mean a capitalist economy with a strong safety net and a low Gini coefficient.  Nor do I mean a community of poets and novelists doing a little kitchen garden farming and animal husbandry, nor even a big kibbutz, or a society of kibbutzim.

By a democratic socialist society, I mean a society in which the fundamental decisions about the rate of savings [and consequent economic growth rate], the structure of wages and salaries, and large scale capital goods projects rest with the people as a whole and, in some manner, with their elected representatives.  I am not talking about worker control of individual factories or offices, or local agricultural, industrial, and service collectives, admirable as those undoubtedly are.

I am assuming that inherited wealth [not the family homestead] is prohibited, and I am agnostic about whether an individual, within his or her lifetime, will be permitted to accumulate considerable wealth.  [If I may make a parenthetical nod to a well-known book by my old friend now sadly departed, Robert Nozick, if sports fans want to shower great wealth on LeBron James, I don’t care, so long as he doesn’t get to invest it in shares of Amazon.com or leave it to his kids.]

The single most important collective decision that a democratic socialist nation would make is the social rate of savings:  the proportion of the social product to be reinvested in economic growth, as opposed to being consumed unproductively by the members of society for their pleasure, amusement, or edification.  [I have at times been quite critical of the work of John Rawls, so I ought here to note that he seems to be the only major political theorist, other than Marx himself, who has understood the importance of this social decision.]  In a capitalist economy, the social rate of savings is not the object of anyone’s decision, but rather is the consequence of the decisions of countless capitalists or corporate managers, indirectly influenced nowadays by governmental decisions about tax rates or interest levels.  In some modern states, most notably China, which seems to have in effect a state capitalist economy, a very large social rate of savings has been deliberately chosen, sacrificing the consumption of the present to the comfort of the future.  In a state with an expanding or aging population [or both], an appropriate social rate of savings is essential simply to maintain current consumption levels.  Note, by the way, that this is entirely separate from the need to set aside some portion of current production for depreciation of the capital stock.

The second important collective decision is wage rates, assuming [as I do] that a considerable share of individual consumption will be paid for out of pocket rather than, as in the case of health care and education, by social spending.  It goes without saying that the income pyramid should be very much flatter than at present, even in those European nations with a well-funded social safety net.  Would the present situation prevail, in which, to put it in shorthand slang terms, suits make significantly more than shirts?  The universal justification among sociologists and economists for this state of affairs is that higher wages are required to attract into socially important jobs those with the special talents or education for them, but I am deeply skeptical of this familiar rationale.  The unstated assumption is that we would all rather be day laborers or garbage collectors, but could be wooed away from those jobs into the offices of doctors, lawyers, or professors by sufficiently lavish salaries.  Absent those salaries, it is presumed, not many would choose actually to teach classes or see patients or, for that matter, manage factories rather than working on the assembly line or cleaning toilets.  Maybe so, but I doubt it.

Perhaps the most important question is this:  with the really important decisions being decided in the public square rather than out of sight in boardrooms and corporate getaways, how would we keep those elected to public office on the straight and narrow, so that they do not use their power, as corporate managers now do, to rob us all blind?  I am absolutely convinced that some of them will try.  I have no expectation that socialism will somehow turn ordinary human beings into paragons of Socialist Man or Woman.  [I have lived through the liberation of South Africa, the glory days of Mandela, and the decline and corruption of the ANC, so I am without illusions.]

The greatest challenge facing advanced capitalism is the progressive substitution of mechanical or robotic production for human production, and the creation thereby of a larger and larger segment of the population whose labor is not required by capitalism.  That, I believe, is a challenge that socialism is uniquely prepared to face.  Properly managed, it can mean the steady diminution in necessary unpleasant labor and its distribution across the entire population, rather than its concentration in one disadvantaged segment of the population.

Well, the eclipse approaches.  I shall be curious to see how the birds respond.

AT LAST, A RELIABLE MEASURE OF MY FAME

Something called ALEXA measures the standing of each blog site, according to its hits, I guess.  The Huffington Post ranks 273rd.  This blog, you will be excited to learn, is ranked 4,909,739!  So be careful what you say.  The world is watching.