MINOR DISASTER

The UMass email system has gone belly up for some reason, so if anyone reading this wants to contact me, post a message on this blog.  Without email I am reduced to thinking, and we all know what that can lead to.

A DARK DAY

The judicially sanctioned murder of Trayvon Martin has affected me more powerfully than I had anticipated.  There was nothing unusual or unexpected about this outrage.  It is of a piece with the last four hundred years of Colonial and American history.  But it has left me deeply depressed.  I am self-aware enough to understand that the depression is the effect of a rage that can find no appropriate expression.  The Florida law was written to enable such acts of violence, and it has been successful.  Martin's mother is religious, and was quoted as saying that in this darkest hour she called upon the Lord.  I genuinely hope that she can find some sort of solace in her faith, for the nation in which she lives has betrayed her.

Meanwhile, Zimmerman's gun will be returned to him.  He would have suffered more severe punishment if he had run over a white person's dog.

I cannot myself truly comprehend the courage it has taken generations of Black men and women to continue their struggle for equality of treatment in the face of the never ending succession of lynchings, murders, and oppressions inflicted on them by the decent, upstanding members of our civil society. 

JUSTICE DENIED

I awoke this morning to learn that the Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman.  Is there anyone on the face of the earth who believes that, had the race of Zimmerman and Martin been reversed, the verdict would have been the same?

PERAMBULATORY MUSINGS

While taking my morning walk, I found my mind turning to the Dickinson poem that I chose as the epigraph of my Autobiography.  I have always been fascinated by those transcendently great creative artists who masquerade as commonplace folk and, by refusing to proclaim themselves, are persistently underestimated by those who know them personally.  Jane Austen and David Hume come to mind.  It always astonishes me that even their biggest fans sometimes imagine that the artists themselves are unaware of their own true quality.  As though one could actually write Pride and Prejudice and yet not be certain whether it were any good.

As I walked, I tried to conjure up a scene -- quite imaginary, of course -- in the Amherst of the 1870's, let us say.  The Editor of the Springfield Republican, Samuel Bowles, has gathered a group of literary types to an afternoon tea in honor of a visiting poet from Boston who has lately been much praised in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly.  Bowles has persuaded his friend and correspondent, Emily Dickinson, to make the long trip down to Springfield for the event.  Dickinson is dressed plainly, and contents herself with standing quietly at the margins of the room while the guests swirl around her, chattering and gossiping about writers and publications.

One of those present is an eager ambitious young man, just launching himself into the literary world, who very much wants to be sure that he has met every important person in the gathering and has made an impression.  After thrusting himself into each cluster of conversation, he notices Dickinson sipping her tea.  Although he doubts that she can be very important, inasmuch as no one is talking to her, he decides to take no chances, and walks up to her boldly.  "Who are you?" he asks, rather impertinently.

Dickinson smiles shyly, takes another sip of tea, and replies:  "I am nobody/who are you/are you nobody too?/Then there's a pair of us/shh don't tell/they'd banish us you know/How dismal to be somebody/how dismal like a frog/to tell your name the live long day/to an admiring bog"

 

ONE OF THE BENEFITS OF MARRYING YOUR CHILDHOOD SWEETHEART

I was lying on our bed idly watching Tora Tora Tora [the old Black and White movie about the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor] when Susie walked in.  "I remember it vividly," she said, "the day the war began."  "I don't have any recollection of it," I replied.  "Well," she said, "I am older than you are."

I burst out laughing.  "That is the first time in sixty-five years that you have pulled rank on me."

Susie was born in January, 1933.  I was born in December, 1933.  So every year, for ten and a half months, she is officially one year older than I am.

There is a certain charm in marrying your childhood sweetheart.

AMERICAN SLAVERY AMERICAN FREEDOM

The distinguished American historian Edmund. S. Morgan died five days ago at the age of ninety-seven.  One of his books, American Slavery American Freedom [1975] profoundly shaped my understanding of the history of this country, an understanding to which I tried to give voice in my last book, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.  As a kind of memorial to his passing, I should like to summarize briefly what I said at greater length in that book.  I believe that what Morgan taught us remains of central importance today in our conception of the story of America.

The dominant "story of America," as I documented it by a close study of the three most successful twentieth century college American History textbooks, is the Story of Freedom, of English colonists coming to an empty continent in search of religious and political liberty.  Their early and imperfect attempts to instantiate the Idea of Freedom in their political institutions failed at first to offer full liberty to the propertyless, to women, and most notably to the Africans whom they brought forcibly to these shores and enslaved.  But slowly, haltingly, painstakingly, America labored to make its Ideal of Freedom a reality for all of its people.  The central traumatic episode of this centuries-long process was the great Civil War that freed the slaves, but the struggle continues to the present day, with the Civil Rights movement, Women's Liberation, LGBT Liberation all bringing us closer to the fulfillment of the original promise of the colonial settlers.  America, according to this story, is the only nation ever to be founded on an Idea.  It is, in the oft-quoted words of John Winthrop, a City Upon a Hill, whose lights shines abroad, calling to it all those who hunger for Liberty.

In these days of post-everything disillusion, it may be difficult for the young to believe that anyone save candidates for public office ever talked this way about America, but I can assure you that just this story, told in precisely this un-ironic fashion, was read and studied by generations of college students at the most distinguished colleges and universities in America.

There have always been dissident voices in the historiographical chorus, most  notably that of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose classic work, Black Reconstruction, told the true story of America three generations before professional historians began to take cognizance of it.  Morgan's detailed, revolutionary study of colonial Virginia, although it was focused on the early developments in only one of the colonies, revealed a story with a fundamentally different structure.  To state Morgan's thesis in a catchphrase. echoed in the title of his book, the story of America is not the story of the slow unfolding of the Idea of Freedom.  Rather, the it is the story of the intertwined unfolding of a dual story:  American Slavery -- American Freedom.

Let me summarize Morgan's core idea briefly.  Those who wish a fuller exposition are urged, in the first instance, to read Morgan himself, and, failing that, to take a look at Chapters Two and Three of my little book.  Here is the central idea.

The North American continent was colonized by those seeking land on which to grow cash crops for the European market.  In the earliest days, the most lucrative crop was tobacco, but rice and sugar were also profitable, and of course eventually cotton took precedence over these.  Transforming virgin forest into farmland suitable for planting required enormous amounts of very hard labor, and the entrepreneurs seeking to turn a profit imported unfree laborers, at first using the English common law status of indentured servitude as the principal vehicle.  In 1619, the first African prisoners were brought to the Virginia colony, initiating what would eventually become the established institution of racially encoded chattel slavery. 

At first, the overwhelming majority of non-Native Americans were unfree.  They were bound in some cases by the terms of their indenture, in other cases by the nascent forms of what became slavery.  Indentured servants could not marry whom they wished, change employers, travel as they wished, enter freely into contracts in the marketplace, hold public office, or do any of the other things that were the birthright of the relatively small numbers of "free men."

Over a period of a century and a half or more, stretching from the earliest arrivals to the Revolutionary War, two sharply differentiated legal statuses crystallized out of this confused legal, social, and economic mixture.  On the one side, there slowly evolved the idea of the free citizen, an idea that found full expression in the Constitution as the status of Citizen.  On the other side, standing in contradistinction to the status of Citizen, there emerged in full legal form the category of Slave.  Each of these statuses was defined in its relation to the other.  To be a Citizen was precisely to be Not a Slave.  To be a slave was precisely to be Not a Citizen.

America, from its founding, was not a Land of Freedom.  It was --and it remains to this very day, in one form or another -- a Land of Slavery and Freedom.  This is the key to understanding the hysterical panic engendered in so many White Americans by the prospect of Black and Brown Americans achieving something resembling full citizenship.  Just as countless heterosexual Americans feel their heterosexuality threatened by the legitimation of homosexuality, as though their heterosexuality can only exist in a world that condemns homosexuality, so countless Americans feel intuitively and instinctively that their freedom is possible only so long as it stands in contradistinction to the unfreedom of others.  They understand, even though they cannot bring that realization to self-conscious articulation, that the American concept of the Free Citizen emerged out of a process of differentiation from the concept of the Slave.  To put it as simply as I can, many Americans are convinced that they are not free unless someone else -- darker of skin than they are, poorer than they are, less fully American than they are -- is unfree.

This is the true story of America.  It is the lasting legacy of Edmund S. Morgan that almost forty years ago he taught us this dark truth about ourselves in American Slavery American Freedom.

FOR WHAT MAY I HOPE?

Immanuel Kant, as students of his philosophy will recall, asks three questions, to which he offers The Critical Philosophy as answers.  The questions are:  What can I know?  What ought I to do?  For what may I hope?  Kant's answer to the last question is, roughly speaking, immortality, but as an atheist I am unable to follow him down that path.  Instead, I concern myself with what we may hope for in this life, rather than in any life to come.

Two years ago, I was invited by Professor Charles O'Kelley to deliver my paper, The Future of Socialism, at a conference he was organizing at the Seattle Univerity Law School.  For that occasion, I prepared some remarks designed to bring my 2007 paper up to date with references to the 2008 crash.  Illness prevented me from attending the conference, but it occurs to me that readers of this blog might be interested in what I planned to say.  I should warn the faint of heart among you that my conclusions are not optimistic.  The original paper is available at box.net, accessible by following the link at the top of this blog.  Here is the text of my Seattle remarks as I prepared it eighteen months ago.

My paper, "The Future of Socialism," is essentially an extended riff on one famous passage in Karl Marx's 1859 work, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.  Here, once more, is the passage:

No social order disappears before all of the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material components of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.

           Marx, who was the first great historian of economics, drew this conclusion from his study of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England, a process that had only recently been brought to completion when he was writing.  As for a possible transition from capitalism to socialism, he was disdainfully scornful of those reformers, labeled by him "Utopian Socialists," who contented themselves with imagining ideal sets of social and economic arrangements without any attention to the facts on the ground that might conceivably lead to the establishment of such fantasies.
         
Since I am committed to this socialist dream, by family inheritance as well as by philosophical persuasion, the first seventy-eight years of my life have been something of a disappointment.   But as Bobby Kennedy liked to say, it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, so taking my cue from Marx, whose response to the failure of the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 was to hole up in the British Museum and write a book, I decided some time ago to see what I could figure out about the conditions under which a transition from capitalism to socialism might take place
         
One of the many things Marx taught us is that if we wish to understand social and economic change -- what he called, in another context, the "laws of motion" of a capitalist economy -- we must look to capitalism's most advanced sector, for it is there, if anywhere, that the elements of a new order will mature "in the womb of the old society."  I decided to look, therefore, at the trajectory of development in the modern corporation, and not in the sphere of small business enterprises or utopian counter-communities, to see whether I could identify new social relations of production developing in utero.  The result of my explorations was the paper you have before you.

I shall not try to summarize my argument, which you have read, but will simply repeat the conclusion:  In a modern multi-national corporation, of the sort that dominates the world economy today, internal economic decisions necessarily take on the logical form of planning decisions rather than profit maximization decisions determined solely by market forces.

In the time allotted to me today, I am going to try to relate my thesis to the dramatic economic crises that have erupted since the paper was written several years ago.   Although my paper focuses exclusively on the individual firm, a parallel argument can easily be made with regard to the entire international capitalist system.  As Marx argued, capitalism in its original form combines an ever more rational organization of production with a chaotic and anarchic process of distribution.  The result is a series of crises of over-production and under-consumption, once described as booms and busts but now described more serenely as "the business cycle."  Marx believed that capitalists, locked in a death struggle of competition, would be unable to take collective action to respond to the threat of a catastrophic collapse, but history has proved him wrong.  Chastened by the Great Depression that Marx had presciently foreseen, and guided by the visible hand of John Maynard Keynes and his epigones, capitalists by fits and starts have learned to use the state as an instrument for the stabilization of the sphere of circulation, to use Marx's term for the market.

What we witnessed in the aftermath of the American investment crisis of 2008, and what we are witnessing now in the midst of the Eurozone crisis, are the fitful, halting, but deliberate efforts of capital to achieve a higher level of international economic planning in order to ensure the steady expansion of profits and the security of accumulated wealth.  The process is not pretty, and it goes without saying that it is inflicting terrible harm on those who do not command the heights of the economy, but I have no doubt that capital will manage to save its neck.  The steady expansion of capitalism demands the stabilization of the accumulation process, even at the expense of the immiseration of the working class [which, I will remind you, includes almost all of the people who like to call themselves "middle class" in a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from those of darker skin.]

There are of course loud and insistent voices, both in the United States and abroad, celebrating the "free market" and decrying any intervention by the state in its Eleusian mysteries.  But it is worth noting that these are, for the most part, the voices of politicians and professors of economics, not business leaders, for the latter understand quite well that the reliability of their profit depends on a stability that the free market cannot ensure.

It would be a mistake, I believe, to view the bailouts, the new regulations, the ad hoc reconfigurations in the Eurozone as temporary measures designed to return a momentarily unhealthy capitalist system to its previous condition.  That is, no doubt, the way in which these changes are viewed both by those imposing them and by those on whom they are being imposed.  But I suggest that we are actually seeing a new, more integrated economic system emerging, one that exhibits many more of the structural features of a planned economy.

What, then, of socialism -- which is to say economic planning in the interest of the people as a whole rather than merely of the monied interests?   It is as unlikely to emerge from this new stage in the development of capitalism as it was from earlier stages.  In addition to the three reasons I sketched in my paper, I should like now to add a fourth.

For the first three centuries of its development, capitalism had an insatiable need for ever greater amounts of cheap labor.  It was that need that produced chattel slavery in the United States and it is the same need that has driven capital on a ceaseless world-wide quest for populations who can be employed for a pittance.  Marx was quite correct that profit is grounded essentially in the exploitation of labor. 

In recent years, however, the explosive expansion of mechanization, and its most recent form, robotics, has produced a situation never before seen.  Very large segments of the world's working class are now superfluous -- no longer needed by capital to sustain its profitability.  We can observe this new phenomenon in the United States, where millions of workers, even those with significant levels of technical skill, are more or less permanently unemployed.  At the moment, of course, America is experiencing unusually high real unemployment as a consequence of the slowdown in business activity, but I am fearfully confident that as business picks up, unemployment will stabilize at levels that in previous decades would have been considered unacceptable.

This fact, that there are simply more people of working age than capital needs, creates a problem for capital, because the Americans marginalized by capitalism's great success have a troubling tendency to grow restive as they lose their homes and health care and begin to go hungry.  Thirty-nine years ago, James O'Connor published a very interesting little book called The Fiscal Crisis of the State.  In it, he pointed out that the state expenditures that we classify as "social welfare expenses" actually perform two quite different functions in a modern capitalist economy.  The first function is to socialize some of the expenses of preparing the labor force for employment, thus relieving capital of most of those expenses.  Hence state-funded public education, and a medical system intended to keep workers healthy enough to labor.

The second function of social welfare expenses is quite different -- its purpose is to dampen social unrest that, if it were to erupt, would disturb the steady accumulation of capital.  O'Connor was convinced that these two functions were in conflict, and that the second of them would eventually cost so much that it would seriously interfere with profitability.  The present day debates about Social Security and Medicare, and the efforts by Republicans to drive down the already low taxes paid by capital, are simply the modern expressions of the forces O'Connor identifies in the early seventies.

The only hope for the socialization of the economy, so that it can respond to human needs rather than to the demands of capital accumulation, is the mobilization of the working class, whether in the union halls or at the ballot box.  But the permanent marginalization of large numbers of working men and women, coupled with the steeply pyramidal wage structure of which I wrote in my paper, will, I fear, frustrate efforts to bring into the world in nascent form a new, humane, just social order.

Although the objective conditions for socialism are indeed developing in the womb of capitalism, as Marx foresaw, there is no joy in the neighborhoods I frequent.  The explosive growth of capitalism in the last half century has not been matched by a growth in the scope and depth of the organization of employees, as workers are now called.  Instead, there has been an ever-greater fragmentation of the working class, which is now virtually powerless in the face of the heaps of capital its productive efforts have created. 

I am by nature an optimistic person.  My friends view me, if I may invoke Winnie the Pooh, as a Tigger, not an Eeyore.  But I am very much afraid that my declining years will be as disappointing as my youth and middle age have been.