SOME QUESTIONS

I had intended this morning to write the second half of my post What Is To Be Done, but the events yesterday compel me to say something about them.  Perhaps this afternoon I can return to my two-part post.

I imagine many of you are having some version of the complex feelings I have experienced at the news of Trump’s abrupt decision to pull out of Syria, Mattis’ remarkable resignation, and the word that Trump also intends to pull most of our troops out of Afghanistan.  On the one hand, anything that weakens and damages Trump is welcome to me.  On the other hand, I am repelled by the virtually universal condemnation of his decisions by those who for decades have advanced an American imperialist policy, most particularly in the Middle East.

But what broad foreign policy do I think the United States ought to pursue?  Never mind for the moment whether there is any chance that it will be implemented.  What should be America’s relation to the rest of the world?  Here are three possibilities.  I do not know what I think, so I welcome discussion.

1.         America could maintain its enormous and enormously expensive military establishment and deploy it around the world in support of genuinely progressive regimes where they exist.  Support Mossadegh, rather than overthrowing him and installing the Shah.  Support the Sandanistas, not the Contras.  And so forth.  This would involve sending American troops into battle, and on occasion getting bogged down in endless local wars between factions no one of which is in any recognizable way progressive or truly socialist, or whatever .  In short, America could try to be a good empire rather than a bad empire.  Could this possibly happen without first a fundamental change in America’s economy, society, and politics?  Good question.

2.         America could dramatically reduce its military spending and the size of its military forces, forge close military alliances with Western European nations “like us,” and leave China to fill the void thus created [as it already is trying to do.]  Let us not fool ourselves.  If we retreat from our imperial stance, someone will take our place.  That is the reality of geopolitics.  Would the world be better off under Chinese hegemony than under American hegemony?  Interesting question.

3.         America could adopt what used to be called a Fortress America policy.  No entangling alliances, even with England or France, no foreign military bases, a dramatically reduced military budget, and a refusal to be drawn into foreign involvement even when refugees are being slaughtered, small countries are being invaded, ruthless dictatorships are being set up.  We protect our borders, threaten to rain destruction on anyone who seeks to breach them, and otherwise leave the rest of the world alone.  This is the Rand Paul proposal, as I understand it.  It is safe, it does not get Americans killed, and it is uncomplicated.  Do we wish to stand by as decent people are enslaved and slaughtered by vile dictators [like us, as some would say]?  Also a good question.

What do you think?

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? PART ONE

This post will be a lengthy reflection on what I have learned from Piketty in the context of what I long ago learned from Marx, all in the service of attempting to advance my thinking about what one can work for and hope for in the years to come.  Since I do not see these matters clearly, I welcome comments and disagreements both from the usual suspects and perhaps also from some of the lurkers out there who have not yet chosen to post comments.

Let me begin with some general observations about capitalism, first in its classic form and then in its modern configuration.  Capitalism is a system of social relations of production characterized by legally free labor, private ownership of the means of production, and production of commodities intended to be sold at a profit.  As a consequence of this basic set of arrangements, capitalists – which is to say the legal owners of capital – accumulate additional capital in each cycle of production.  This is not a failure of the system; it is the system.  As time goes on, the accumulation of capital grows ever larger, while what is owned by the workers [this is still the classic form] is consumed in reproducing their labor, which is to say in staying alive and raising the next generation of workers.  Inasmuch as capital is in all capitalist economies legally inheritable, over time there emerges a class of capitalists whose relationship to the production process is purely one of inherited ownership.  This is what Piketty, following the French fashion, calls patrimonial capitalism.  Fairly quickly, as capitalism develops, the wealth gap between capitalists and workers becomes enormous and seemingly eternal and inevitable.

As capitalism develops, ownership of capital, which carries with it, at least theoretically, a right to a share of the profits, is separated from day-to-day or even intermittent control of the use of capital, through the introduction and spread of joint stock limited liability corporations.  The classic study of this epochal shift in the structure of capitalism is a book now eighty-six years old, The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means.  As a result of this shift, capital in the form of private corporations comes to be directed by salaried managers who only in the rarest of cases actually personally own more than tiny fractions of the totality of shares in the corporations. 

Contrary to Marx’s expectation, which he based on his observation of capitalism as it functioned in the middle of the nineteenth century, as capitalism develops, along with it there develops a seemingly immutable and sharply pyramidal structure of work paid for by wages or salaries.  To a considerable extent, the lives, the prospects, and hence the subjective experiences of those at the top or in the middle of the pyramid differ so widely from those in the lower half of the pyramid that these men and women, although they are all wage earners in a capitalist economy, neither have nor experience themselves as having common interests and needs.  Mainstream economists, following the work of Gary Becker, talk of some workers as having acquired “human capital” in the form of education or specialized skills, the implication being [whether they intend it or not] that a portion of their compensation is in the form of profit, rather than wages.  This theoretical analysis has led Marxist economists like [the young] Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis to develop theories of relative exploitation, the idea being that just as capitalists exploit workers, even including those earning high salaries, pace Marx, so high salaried employees exploit lower paid workers, in effect gaining a portion of their higher salaries not from their capitalist masters but from their less well prepared underlings.

Enter Piketty.  As Piketty demonstrates in his important work Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, the ever-more unequal distribution of wealth that characterized as much of the industrialized world as he had the data to study was sharply reversed in the years after World War II.  It appeared to academic economists, writing in the sixties and seventies and even later, that mature capitalism had solved the problem of inequality and had forged a social compact that brought ever greater wealth and income to workers as well as capitalists.  Piketty decisively demonstrated that in fact the post-war period, what the French called les trentes glorieuses, was in fact an historically temporary phenomenon caused by the material and value destruction of the Great Depression and the war.  The inexorable march of ever greater inequality resumed after that period of reversal, and now reaches levels of inequality comparable to those of the Gilded Age, the late nineteenth century.  There was, Piketty noted, one great difference in the sources and shape of the inequality, namely the role of enormously inflated corporate salaries.  The managers of the great corporations use their de facto unregulated control of the corporations they manage to divert a share of the profits to themselves in the form of inflated salaries and bonuses.  The magnitude of this diversion makes it more and more difficult for economists to defend the theoretical nonsense that the salaries of those at the top are merely their “marginal product.”

Enter Piketty a second time, with his colleagues Saez and Zucman.  Starting roughly during the Reagan years [or the Carter years, as Jerry Fresia argues], the compensation for the Bottom 50% flattens, the compensation for the next 40% rises slowly but steadily, and the compensation for the top 10% [and even for the top 1% or 0.1%] soars off the charts.  The social welfare programs, the so-called “safety net,” that buoyed the Bottom Half through a variety of pre-tax and post-tax transfer payments cease to function as they had in the preceding fifty years.

I find it interesting to connect this development with an old book to which I have alluded before on this blog:  The Fiscal Crisis of the State, by James O’Connor, published in 1973.  Briefly, O’Connor argues that federal expenditures in a capitalist America serve two quite different functions.  The first function is to socialize some of the necessary expenditures of capital, such as the education of workers.  The second function is, in effect, bread and circuses to keep the turbulent masses quiet.  O’Connor argues that the cost of the second function is outrunning revenues, threatening a fiscal crisis.

O’Connor seems to me to have been right, but writing in 1972-73 [which is to say, during what we now call somewhat inaccurately “The Sixties”] he failed to anticipate that capital would be able simply to cancel the circuses and stop distributing the bread.  In short, he failed to foresee the flatlining of the compensation of the Bottom Half that Piketty et al. demonstrate in their recent essay.

What, if anything, does all this tell us about the way forward for those of us on the left?  I shall pause, post this, and return to the subject tomorrow.

A RESPONSE TO IN THE DARK

Someone self-identified as “In The dark” offers this response to my reposting of my son’s FaceBook post of Professor Steve Locke's account of his experience with the police:

“In The Dark said...

I get how frustrating and terrifying it is to be detained by the police (and I know all too well how they will slip past your rights if you let them), but I don't get what these officers did wrong. No, you just saying you aren't the suspect isn't going to clear you of suspicion. But why should it? Isn't that a ridiculous thing to expect? And the eye-witness testimony of another person doesn't "decide" you're a criminal--the court does that--and I see no reason to think the cops were going to let the woman decide that. And if she positively IDed him during the detention, my understanding is that that would have been probable cause to arrest him.

What am I missing here? Please explain it to me. I really do want to understand.”

All right, let me explain it to you.  This is not simple, so you will have to be patient and exercise a certain amount of imagination.  You are going to have to be willing to keep in mind a good deal of background information that was immediately and painfully available to Professor Locke, but may not in the same way and with the same urgency be available to you.

Your question is, “what did the officers do wrong?”  Let us suppose I were stopped in that fashion by two police officers who had received word of a breakin by an old white man wearing jeans and a sweater. [Parenthetically, let me note that there are virtually no cases of an innocent old white man being shot dead by a policeman because he reached into his pocket for ID and the policeman thought he was reaching for a gun.]  Suppose that when old white men are stopped by policemen [something that rarely happens], they are treated politely and with respect, even with a certain deference, because that is the way police routinely treat old white men, especially those  who look upper middle class.  Would the policeman address me as “Hey my man”?  Not likely.  Would he unsnap the holster of his sidearm as he addressed me?  Also not likely.

After I had identified myself, would the policeman say that the victim had to identify me as well, or would he apologize and continue looking for the alleged perpetrator?  I rather suspect the former.

Now look at it from the point of view of Professor Locke.  Did his father have “the talk” with him when he entered his teen years?  I would guess yes.  [If you do not know what “the talk” is, you really need to look it up, in order to broaden your understanding of American society.]  Did you note, in Professor Locke’s account, that before reaching for his wallet to show ID he asked the policeman whether that was all right?  Do you understand that that simple question was Professor Locke’s desperate effort to avoid being shot by a policeman with an itchy trigger finger?  Do you understand why he was terrified of getting into the police cruiser, even though he is a college professor? 

What might the officers have done differently?  Well – and this is complicated – the entire American police force might fundamentally change the way it interacts with African-Americans.  But, you protest, these two officers cannot change the way the entire criminal justice system interacts with Black men!  And this is where things get difficult.  That was not only an interaction between one Black college professor and two white policemen.  It was an interaction between the Black population of America and the entire criminal justice system.  And it cannot be understood unless one grasps this fact.

All well and good, you may say, but in the moment, right then and there, how should they have acted differently?  And the answer is: While these two policemen were, so to speak, waiting for all of America to change, they could themselves have chosen to interact with Professor Locke as though they were interacting with a white man.  Had they done so, the entire interaction would have gone differently and in a non-threatening manner for Professor Locke.  But they did not.

That is what they did wrong.

Let me close with an old, bitter joke told by my colleagues in the Afro-American Studies department at UMass Amherst:

What do you call a Black man with a Ph. D.?

Answer:  Nigger.

JUST READ THIS AND WEEP

I am copying this from the FaceBook page of my son, Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff.  I had intended to spend today writing a lengthy post bringing together what I have learned from Piketty and Marx and others, but then I read this and I just felt sick inside.  The words before the picture are those of Tobias.

This man is a career academic. I am a career academic. We share a vocation and a professional status. And yet, I have never had anything remotely like this happen to me, and I am able to lead my life without ever having to worry that something like this will happen to me.

Please read Professor Locke's entire narrative.

Tray John

Yesterday at 10:56 AM

This is a professor, who has the tools to articulate how this encounter affected him. He also has the age and wisdom that allowed for him to maintain his composure and not lose his life. Now, imagine a YOUNG Black person, who is not equip with either.

Steve Locke wrote:
"This is what I wore to work today.

On my way to get a burrito before work, I was detained by the police.

I noticed the police car in the public lot behind Centre Street. As I was walking away from my car, the cruiser followed me. I walked down Centre Street and was about to cross over to the burrito place and the officer got out of the car.

“Hey my man,” he said.

He unsnapped the holster of his gun.

I took my hands out of my pockets.

“Yes?” I said.

“Where you coming from?”

“Home.”

Where’s home?”

“Dedham.”

How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

He was next to me now. Two other police cars pulled up. I was standing in from of the bank across the street from the burrito place. I was going to get lunch before I taught my 1:30 class. There were cops all around me.

I said nothing. I looked at the officer who addressed me. He was white, stocky, bearded.

“You weren’t over there, were you?” He pointed down Centre Street toward Hyde Square.

“No. I came from Dedham.”

“What’s your address?”

I told him.

“We had someone matching your description just try to break into a woman’s house.”

A second police officer stood next to me; white, tall, bearded. Two police cruisers passed and would continue to circle the block for the 35 minutes I was standing across the street from the burrito place.

“You fit the description,” the officer said. “Black male, knit hat, puffy coat. Do you have identification.”

“It’s in my wallet. May I reach into my pocket and get my wallet?”

“Yeah.”

I handed him my license. I told him it did not have my current address. He walked over to a police car. The other cop, taller, wearing sunglasses, told me that I fit the description of someone who broke into a woman’s house. Right down to the knit cap.

Barbara Sullivan made a knit cap for me. She knitted it in pinks and browns and blues and oranges and lime green. No one has a hat like this. It doesn’t fit any description that anyone would have. I looked at the second cop. I clasped my hands in front of me to stop them from shaking.

“For the record,” I said to the second cop, “I’m not a criminal. I’m a college professor.” I was wearing my faculty ID around my neck, clearly visible with my photo.

“You fit the description so we just have to check it out.” The first cop returned and handed me my license.

“We have the victim and we need her to take a look at you to see if you are the person.”

It was at this moment that I knew that I was probably going to die. I am not being dramatic when I say this. I was not going to get into a police car. I was not going to present myself to some victim. I was not going let someone tell the cops that I was not guilty when I already told them that I had nothing to do with any robbery. I was not going to let them take me anywhere because if they did, the chance I was going to be accused of something I did not do rose exponentially. I knew this in my heart. I was not going anywhere with these cops and I was not going to let some white woman decide whether or not I was a criminal, especially after I told them that I was not a criminal. This meant that I was going to resist arrest. This meant that I was not going to let the police put their hands on me.

If you are wondering why people don’t go with the police, I hope this explains it for you.

Something weird happens when you are on the street being detained by the police. People look at you like you are a criminal. The police are detaining you so clearly you must have done something, otherwise they wouldn’t have you. No one made eye contact with me. I was hoping that someone I knew would walk down the street or come out of one of the shops or get off the 39 bus or come out of JP Licks and say to these cops, “That’s Steve Locke. What the F*CK are you detaining him for?”

The cops decided that they would bring the victim to come view me on the street. The asked me to wait. I said nothing. I stood still.

“Thanks for cooperating,” the second cop said. “This is probably nothing, but it’s our job and you do fit the description. 5′ 11″, black male. One-hundred-and-sixty pounds, but you’re a little more than that. Knit hat.”

A little more than 160. Thanks for that, I thought.

An older white woman walked behind me and up to the second cop. She turned and looked at me and then back at him. “You guys sure are busy today.”

I noticed a black woman further down the block. She was small and concerned. She was watching what was going on. I focused on her red coat. I slowed my breathing. I looked at her from time to time.

I thought: Don’t leave, sister. Please don’t leave.

The first cop said, “Where do you teach?”

“Massachusetts College of Art and Design.” I tugged at the lanyard that had my ID.

“How long you been teaching there?”

“Thirteen years.”

We stood in silence for about 10 more minutes.

An unmarked police car pulled up. The first cop went over to talk to the driver. The driver kept looking at me as the cop spoke to him. I looked directly at the driver. He got out of the car.

“I’m Detective Cardoza. I appreciate your cooperation.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sure these officers told you what is going on?”

“They did.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“From my home in Dedham.”

“How did you get here?”

“I drove.”

“Where is your car?”

“It’s in the lot behind Bukhara.” I pointed up Centre Street.

“Okay,” the detective said. “We’re going to let you go. Do you have a car key you can show me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to reach into my pocket and pull out my car key.”

“Okay.”

I showed him the key to my car.

The cops thanked me for my cooperation. I nodded and turned to go.

“Sorry for screwing up your lunch break,” the second cop said.

I walked back toward my car, away from the burrito place. I saw the woman in red.

“Thank you,” I said to her. “Thank you for staying.”

“Are you ok?” She said. Her small beautiful face was lined with concern.

“Not really. I’m really shook up. And I have to get to work.”

“I knew something was wrong. I was watching the whole thing. The way they are treating us now, you have to watch them. ”

“I’m so grateful you were there. I kept thinking to myself, ‘Don’t leave, sister.’ May I give you a hug?”

“Yes,” she said. She held me as I shook. “Are you sure you are ok?”

“No I’m not. I’m going to have a good cry in my car. I have to go teach.”

“You’re at MassArt. My friend is at MassArt.”

“What’s your name?” She told me. I realized we were Facebook friends. I told her this.

“I’ll check in with you on Facebook,” she said.

I put my head down and walked to my car.

My colleague was in our shared office and she was able to calm me down. I had about 45 minutes until my class began and I had to teach. I forgot the lesson I had planned. I forget the schedule. I couldn’t think about how to do my job. I thought about the fact my word counted for nothing, they didn’t believe that I wasn’t a criminal. They had to find out. My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them. My handmade one-of-a-kind knit hat was an object of suspicion. My Ralph Lauren quilted blazer was only a “puffy coat.” That white woman could just walk up to a cop and talk about me like I was an object for regard. I wanted to go back and spit in their faces. The cops were probably deeply satisfied with how they handled the interaction, how they didn’t escalate the situation, how they were respectful and polite.

I imagined sitting in the back of a police car while a white woman decides if I am a criminal or not. If I looked guilty being detained by the cops imagine how vile I become sitting in a cruiser? I knew I could not let that happen to me. I knew if that were to happen, I would be dead.

Nothing I am, nothing I do, nothing I have means anything because I fit the description.

I had to confess to my students that I was a bit out of it today and I asked them to bear with me. I had to teach.

After class I was supposed to go to the openings for First Friday. I went home."

~Steve Locke

A FEW MORE FACTS

Both S. Wallerstein and Jerry Fresia ask penetrating questions in response to my rueful post, “What we have lost,” but before I try to reply to them, let me offer another data point in my effort to flesh out the implications of the Piketty et al. essay.  This table shows the evolution of the federal minimum wage over its lifetime, normalized to 2014 prices.  The change between 2014 and now is small, of course.  Notice that the minimum wage rose steadily from 1938, when it was introduced by Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression, to Johnson’s final year in office, 1968.  It then declined in real terms [because periodic raises did not keep pace with inflation], sinking during George W. Bush’s second term to a level it had not seen since Truman was in office.  It is now $7.25 an hour, which is two-thirds what it was, in real terms, fifty years ago.  In short, the minimum wage fifty years ago had a much greater equalizing effect on the American economy than it has now. 

One of the many proposals being discussed on the left is the guaranteed minimum income.  When I googled around, I discovered to my amusement and astonishment that among those who have advanced versions of this proposal are the first imam of Islam, Abu Bakr, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Paine, and Paul Samuelson.  The only person missing from this list is Jesus, and I think his miracle of the loaves and the fishes can be taken as a step in that direction.

WHAT WE HAVE LOST

As some of you are aware, I spent a good deal of time in the early nineties sorting through the trove of family papers I inherited at my father’s death and writing two books from them, one about my grandparents and one about my parents [neither of which, of course, I published.]  I was especially fascinated by my father’s father, Barnet Wolff, who devoted his life to the Socialist Party and was one of its leaders in New York City during the first three decades of the 20^th century.  As part of my research on his political career, I dug up the platforms for several years of the Socialist Party [the Norman Thomas organization, for those who are deep into this stuff] and observed that save for the proposal to collectivize the ownership or production, most of its planks had actually been enacted during the New Deal by the Democratic Party under the leadership of FDR.

This morning, as I was turning over in my mind ways to continue the discussion I started on this blog a few days ago, I checked in with the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup on The Daily Kos and found this striking account.  It details a number of revolutionary proposals, now being advanced by the most progressive wing of the modern Democratic Party, that were actually put forward by Roosevelt and in some cases in some form written into law.   Tears came to my eyes [I cry easily] as I reflected on how much we have lost in the course of my long life.  Rather than struggle to identify radical new themes to set the course of a resurgent progressive movement, we could save ourselves a good deal of time by simply resurrecting this seventy-four year old document.

CONTINUING THE DISCUSSION

My continuing reflections on the essay by Piketty et al. have elicited a number of interesting and suggestive responses, including those of S. Wallerstein and Jerry Fresia.  Rather than respond to their comments, with which I largely agree, I should like to add to the discussion by going into several matters that may help us to advance our thinking about the present situation.  By the way, I am well aware that major developments are unfolding in many parts of the world, including China, India, and a number of European nations, but I simply do not know enough about these matters to form or to express intelligent opinions.  My silence is not at all a judgment on their significance, simply a consequence of my ignorance.

First of all, let us keep in mind that there are three elementary facts about any society that, more than anything else, determine its economic and political trajectory.  The first is the proportion of the working age population in agriculture.  The second is the proportion of the total population of working age.  The third is the rate of growth of the population.  The first determines how many people of working age are freed up to engage in manufacture or services or other productive activities.  The second determines how heavy the burden is on the working age population of supporting the non-working age share of the population in addition to supporting itself.  The third determines [or at least shapes] the rate of social saving required to expand the total output to accommodate the additional people.

The so-called Neolithic Revolution took humanity from a hunting/gathering or foraging stage of existence, by means of the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, into a productive stage that freed up people to build cities, form governments, muster armies, fight large scale wars, build places of worship, and also, most important of all, write philosophy books.

The Industrial Revolution dramatically reduced the share of the population engaged in agriculture and ushered in the world in which virtually everyone on earth lives.  In my view, far and away the most consequential revolutionary change of the past half century has been the transformation of China and India [and other smaller nations] from primarily agricultural to primarily industrial or post-industrial economies.

This interactive chart shows the percentage of the population of working age, by country, over the past forty-eight years.  The United States is in the middle of the pack with Korea at the top and Israel at the bottom.  The working age share of the U. S. population has risen and fallen between 62% and 66% [roughly] over that time.

The next thing we need to know is the proportion of the working age population in the labor force.  This requires some explanation, as it is not obvious what that means.  [In my multi-part tutorial, entitled “The Study of Society,” accessible via the box.net link at the top of this blog, I talk for a bit about how this notion changes for pre-capitalist, capitalist, and socialist societies.]

The U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], as you probably know, keeps track of monthly and yearly changes in the unemployment rate, defined simply as the proportion of the population in the labor force that is not employed full time.  To determine this, it selects a carefully crafted sample of 50,000 households, and sends people out each month to ask of the working age people in each household, “How many working age persons are there in this household, and of those, how many were employed full time last month?”  According to this chart, 73.3% of America’s working age population is in the labor force.  [Once again, the U. S. is more or less in the middle range among nations in this regards]

Now the BLS is well aware that there are people who would like to work but have given up looking because they cannot find jobs.  It dubs these folks “discouraged workers,” and it keeps track of them by asking, in its monthly surveys, “Have you looked for work in the previous twelve months.”

Needless to say, in every conceivable category, things are worse for African-American and Hispanic workers.

Why does all of this matter?  Because the people not in the labor force are people, as are the unemployed and the discouraged workers, and they are mostly part of what I have been calling the Bottom Half.  [Obviously, wives of rich men are not, but an ever larger proportion of working age women are in the labor force, and as you would expect, they are disproportionately at the lower end of the income spectrum.]  If we are trying to think through policies designed to alter the steeply unequal [and unjust] shape of the income distribution, we need to figure out how to bring more working age unemployed men and women into the labor force and prepare them for and offer them decent jobs.  This is not the same thing as lowering the official unemployment rate, which is currently at a multi-decade low.

Mind you, I do not have viable, politically feasible proposals in my back pocket, but I think it helps to set the scene in this way for our thinking, so that we can move beyond the usual proposals, admirable as they may be.

I will close by saying that I agree both with S. Wallerstein that it will be extremely difficult to build solidarity between those in the Bottom Half and those in the 50/90 range, and with Jerry Fresia that we must look at the bipartisan corporate neo-liberal consensus on which America’s party politics have rested since Carter [I would have said “since Reagan,” but there is only a few years’ difference there, and I bow to his superior memory.]