A SECRET REVEALED

It is an odd fact that if you suffer from some condition, it is reassuring to discover that it has a name, and even more reassuring to find that many others suffer from it as well.  Think how unbearable mortality would be if you were the only person to have contracted it.  This thought is prompted by my reading of a fascinating and extremely detailed evaluation of the Chapel Hill graduate Philosophy program prepared, as part of a departmental self-critique, by present and former graduate students.

At one point in the 37 page document reference is made to something called "Imposter Syndrome," a phrase with which I was unfamiliar.  Google took me to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia told me that "Impostor syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be."

I was enormously cheered up by reading this because all my life I have been suffering from something that I now discover has a name and afflicts large numbers of other people as well.  I began my long teaching career lecturing at Harvard on the history of Europe from Caesar to Napoleon despite never having taken a college history course.  I went on to teach a survey of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago without the slenderest scholarly credentials for such an enterprise.  I strut about posing as a Kant scholar when I cannot really read German.  I write endlessly about economics despite the fact that I probably could not pass an undergraduate Micro exam [although I have actually taught undergraduate Micro to two hundred UMass students.  Talk about being an imposter!] 

My secret shameful self-image is Wile e Coyote, who races pell mell over the edge of cliff and only discovers, twenty feet out, that he is no longer standing on anything, whereupon he plummets like a rock to earth.

But it is all right, because it seems there are many of us, and we have a syndrome.  Now, if I could only find a support group.

ONE FOR THE AGES

Okay, here it is.  If you have never seen the Abbott and Costello routine, do yourself a favor and watch it.  Old time comedy does not get any better than this.

NEAT THING

The trick at the heart of today's NY TIMES puzzle is really brilliant.  I won't spoil it for any of you who have not yet done the puzzle, but after a bit, if you wish, I will reveal it.  One of the cleverest I have seen.

I was so excited I screwed up the 4x4 KenKen, which I never do.  Oh well, win one, lose one.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM DOSTOYEVSKY?

One of my favorite literary characters, at least for purposes of snarking references, is Smerdyakov, the bastard son of old Fyodor Karamazov  Smerdyakov admires and seeks uncomprehendingly to imitate Ivan Karamazov, with disastrous results.

I see that Rand Paul has officially announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President.  He is this cycle's Smerdyakov.

A GLIMMER OF LIGHT

One of the happy consequences of my intense engagement with the text of Capital this semester is that I tend, more even than usual, to see everything through Marx's eyes.  Today, I shall try to develop a somewhat ambitious interpretation in this fashion of an Op Ed column by Paul Krugman which in turn is a comment on something written by UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong.  Since DeLong's piece is written for economists in what I might call macro-speak, a dialect with which I am only glancingly familiar, I may be getting some things wrong.  I invite corrections.

Let me begin with one of Marx's most famous statements, this one not from Capital itself but from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859 when Marx was hard at work on his hauptwerk.  In the Preface, Marx writes:

" No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation."

This is an extremely profound and important observation with far-reaching implications for anyone interested in the prospects for sweeping social and economic change.  I have tried to explore some of those implications in my essay "The Future of Socialism," and these remarks are an extension of that essay.

Marx of course had in mind the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe, a process unfolding over many centuries that he had studied as deeply as the available historiographical materials permitted in the mid-nineteenth century.  In my essay, I tried to figure out what developments maturing in the womb of capitalism might be understood as "higher relations of production" preparing the way for socialism.

The first thing to recognize is that such fore-runners of socialism can be expected to appear in the most advanced sectors of capitalism, not in backwaters or pre-capitalist holdovers like universities or farmers' markets.  The central purpose of my essay was to identify internal, structural features of modern corporations that could plausibly be understood as at least creating the possibility of the collective ownership and control of the means of production, the true hallmark of socialism.  Rather than rehearse what I said there, I invite interested readers to go to box.net from the link at the top of this page and consult the essay.

In his discussion of the transition from feudalism to capitalism [and, indeed, in his comments on the prior transition from ancient slavery to feudalism] Marx rather mordantly observes that as structural changes in the social relations of production begin to percolate up from the base, philosophers and theologians perched high up in the superstructure miraculously find objective, eternal, universal, a priori grounds for enunciating new principles of justice and new theories of economic behavior to justify the ways of capitalists to the unwashed.

I sense from Krugman's column that something rather like that is taking place along the forward cutting edge of economists.  Let me explain briefly.  The original ideological rationalizations of capitalism were designed to justify the overturning of the late feudal restrictions on the unfettered economic activity of early capitalist entrepreneurs and the equally unrestricted movement of legally free laborers.  The rational pursuit of self-interest by  all concerned, it was argued, would result in the maximally efficient use of scarce resources and the corresponding maximization of the satisfactions of producers and consumers alike.  The moral and political theories of Locke, Rousseau, Kant and others were devised, whether consciously or not, to provide ideological cover for these beliefs.  A clear implication of this set of convictions, embraced and urged by the defenders of classical capitalism, was that the role of the state could be no more than that of referee and enforcer of contracts.  Left to its own devices, capitalism, as the only rational form of economic activity, would flourish.

The Great Depression constituted a counter-example to this faith impossible to ignore.  And so we were given Keynes, who argued that the state should take an active role in dampening the amplitude of the business cycle by direct fiscal intervention, engaging in deficit spending during shortfalls of effective demand and recapturing what had been socially advanced, through taxation, during the ensuing boom years.  This proposal presupposed a level of knowledge and of institutional fine-tuning impossible during the earliest stages of capitalism, but by the Thirties well within the scope of possibility as a consequence of new social relationships of production growing in the womb of capitalism.

Now, in the Op Ed by Krugman and the essay by DeLong, we see a theoretical defense of a new stage in the evolution of collective control over the economy.  Krugman summarizes DeLong's essay, as follows: "First, he argues that we should not only expect but want government to be substantially bigger in the future than it was in the past. Second, he suggests that public debt levels have historically been too low, not too high."

I leave it to those who are interested to follow the links to the essay and Krugman's comments on it.  What I am wondering is this:  How much further can DeLong, Krugman, and others like them go in drawing out the implications of their macroeconomic theorizing before it finally occurs to one of them that perhaps what they are really arguing is that the time has come for socialism?

Alas, my guess is, forever.  But it is nice to see the smartest of the rationalizers of capitalism recognizing that the logic of their argument drives them toward greater collective control over the means of production.

 

 

 

 

 

REALLY SERIOUSLY BAD

I had a nice interesting theoretical post planned for tomorrow, and then I read that Chuck Schumer, annointed as Harry Reid's successor in the Senate as Democratic Leader, is siding with those who seek to undermine and sink the deal now being negotiated with Iran.  So Bibi Netanyahu really does run American foreign policy, it seems.  Schumer should be ashamed of himself.  I hope when war starts, he will be on hand to welcome home every wounded soldier and explain to every widow or widower why he thought war was a better option than negotiation.

The blood lust of those whose own bodies are safe is a disgrace. 

A REQUEST FOR CLARIFICATION

Over the weekend, Susie went to see Gett:  The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.  [I could not bring myself to see it -- I thought it would make me too angry.]  Afterward, she said that neither she nor the people sitting near her could figure out whether the central character ever got the divorce.  Can anyone help us out?