TWO LITTLE THINGS TO START THE WEEK

1.   You will have noticed that the link to box.net no longer works. UMass has transitioned to a different service, about which I have received endless incomprehensible messages. I just called the OIT Help Desk and they said they would help so if you are patient, my hope is that I will have a new link that will function. Otherwise, my life’s work will float around in cyberspace forever, present but inaccessible. Fingers crossed.

 

2. Here comes another crotchet from the old guy. Everybody, it seems, uses the word “decimate” to mean roughly “totally destroy,” or something of that sort. Actually, it does not mean that at all (I know, I know, if everybody uses a word in a certain way that is what it means, but still.) The commanders of the legions of the old Roman Empire had a particularly brutal way of punishing substandard performance in battle. They would line the troops up and put to death every 10^th man (hence decimate.) This was not supposed to destroy the Legion but rather to improve performance, and I rather imagine it did. So please do not use “decimate” when what you mean is “wipe out.”

 

If I must be a reluctant witness of the untergang des Abendlandes, at least I will insist on a proper choice of words to describe the disasters around  me.

THOUGHTS FROM AN INSANE ASYLUM

There is a good deal of human behavior that I can understand, however much I may deplore it: behavior motivated by greed, by hatred, by fear, by envy, by religion, by ignorance, by stupidity, even by ideology. But there is some behavior, manifested right now across the United States, that genuinely mystifies me, and although I can put names to such behavior, I do not truly understand it. I have in mind the fury manifested by some parents directed at people trying to protect their children from harm. Not other people’s children – that I can understand quite well – but their own children. A father charges into a classroom and rips the mask off the face of the teacher of his very own child.

 

I have learned to use phrases like “death cult” but I do not genuinely understand what they refer to. I can even understand, in some sense or other, people who, desperately sick with Covid and about to be intubated, continue to deny the existence of the virus. But their own children!?

 

Left-wing thought, despite its elegant deployment of concepts like “ideological mystification” or “class consciousness,” relies at its base on the assumption that people are in some fundamental and ineradicable fashion self-interested. I watch what is happening in this country right now with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I have stumbled into a madhouse and I am left with the determination to do whatever I can to keep my wife and myself safe.

DARK THOUGHTS

There are some people, I suppose, who take a certain private pleasure in viewing with alarm or looking askance or crying doom, but I am not one of them. Generally speaking, I prefer it when the world seems to be going more or less in the right direction. That being so, the last 80 or so years of my life have been something of a downer. Right now, I feel oppressed by so many evils, stupidities, alarming prospects, and general bad stuff that I have taken to huddling under the covers in the morning until almost 6 AM before getting up to take my morning walk. I do not think there is much likelihood that things are going to get better in the next few years, and the next few years being in all likelihood among my last, that is a depressing thought. I draw no larger meaning from these facts, I simply report them.

 

Now let me tell you a cautionary tale. Two days ago I took Susie out to a restaurant to celebrate our anniversary. I have in the car a handicap placard which Susie got many years ago because of her multiple sclerosis. The placard has in fact lapsed and I have negligently failed to renew it but it sits on the dashboard of my car. It used to be that I was punctilious about never using it save when Susie was in the car, but now that I have Parkinson’s disease I use it even when I am driving alone.

 

When we arrived at the restaurant we found a handicap space right at the front door, in which I parked. As we were leaving a young policeman came into the restaurant and when we stepped outside I saw that his car was blocking ours. He came out of the restaurant and it turned out he was looking for us! Very politely, even deferentially, he noted that the handicap placard had expired. He assured me that nothing was going to happen as a result of this but said that I really must get it renewed. I apologized, thanked him, and yesterday in two trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles, I obtained an updated placard that is good for the next five years. As an anarchist, I am always of course especially apprehensive about run-ins with the law so I felt a frisson of concern about the event, but it all ended happily.

 

I assume what happened is this: someone drove up to the restaurant looking for a handicap place and saw my car occupying it. Irritated, he (I would be willing to bet it was a man) looked more closely and saw the handicap placard but then noticed that it had expired, so in a fit of pique he called the cops and the young officer showed up.

 

The young police officer was black and I am white. Suppose he had been white and I had been black. How might the encounter have ended? I gave that a good deal of thought as we drove away.

MEMORIES

Today Susie and I celebrate our 34^th wedding anniversary. Later this year, in November, we will take note of the 73^rd anniversary of our first date. Susie and I were in the same homeroom at Forest Hills High School in 1948. Since the teachers then seated students in alphabetical order (all except Mr. Zissowitz, who rather puckishly seated them in reverse alphabetical order, giving me in his English class my one shot at a front row seat) Robert Wolff sat right behind Susan Schaeffer.  Since we had both entered high school in January 1947 (I was born in December and she in January) we were in the second half of our sophomore year.

 

I was enormously taken with Susie and finally screwed up the courage to ask her out on a date. I took her to the upper West Side Thalia theater for a revival of the prewar classic movie César, the third in a trilogy made from plays by Marcel Pagnol.  Almost immediately I fell in love with her and we went together for the next five years until, in the spring of my senior year at Harvard, she dumped me for Gordon Hirschhorn and it then took me another 34 years to get her to marry me.

 

The pandemic being what it is, there is not a great deal we can do to celebrate but I shall take her to dinner at a French restaurant in Durham where we can have escargots. 

DUH!

As I was walking this morning, I found myself imagining, as I have so often in the past, that someone was asking me what Marx thought socialism would look like. I observed, in this imaginary conversation, that Marx wrote vast amounts about capitalism and almost nothing about socialism. In my mind I quoted again, as I have so frequently, the famous tagline from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, to the effect that the new order grows in the womb of the old. Then I referred this imaginary interlocutor to my essay The Future of Socialism, in which I invoke that tagline while explaining why capitalism has moved beyond the point at which the market can be relied upon neutrally to set prices.

 

But then a new thought occurred to me, and after it popped into my mind it seemed to me so obvious that I could not explain to myself why it had never occurred to me before. Socialism, for Marx and also, I might add, for me can be defined simply in seven words as “collective ownership of the means of production.” Is there some sense in which collective ownership of the means of production has begun to develop within capitalism?

 

At this point, figuratively speaking, I struck my forehead with the palm of my hand and said “duh!” (I do not ever actually strike my forehead with the palm of my hand but allow me a little literary license.) Of course there is a sense in which collective ownership of the means of production has begun to develop within capitalism: the stock joint publicly traded corporation.  Almost all modern corporations are collectively owned – privately collectively owned. They are owned by the shareholders.

 

In almost all cases – but perhaps not in the most famous cases – those who manage the corporations and make the investment decisions own at most tiny fractions of the total number of shares the collectivity of which constitutes the financial representation of the capital of the corporation.

 

To be sure, in many cases the managers of a corporation, who are technically speaking employees and whose salaries are listed as part of the costs incurred by the corporation, manage legally to steal a portion of the profits of the corporation and to award it to themselves in the form of inflated salaries, stock options, and other perquisites. But nevertheless, a transition from private ownership of the means of production to collective public ownership of the means of production has already been achieved by means of the intermediary stage of collective private ownership of the means of production.

 

There may be many arguments for capitalism and against socialism but one argument that cannot be made is that collective ownership of the means of production is unworkable, because in fact modern capitalism already exhibits collective (private) ownership of the means of production.

 

Well, I was so pleased with myself when this obvious thought occurred to me that I turned my attention back to where my feet were going – a constant necessity for someone suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Still and all, obvious though it is, this thought strikes me as important enough to lay before you for your consideration and comment.

AN OLD MAN'S CROTCHET

In July 1957, just a bit more than 64 years ago, I got on a bus in Central Square, Cambridge and rode off with a bunch of other six-monthers to do basic training at Fort Dix,That New Jersey. When basic training was over, I was sent to Fort Devens, Massachusetts to be trained in communications. This was before computers, cell phones, and other such technological marvels, and communications training consisted of such things as learning to climb telephone poles with gaffs strapped to your ankles so that you could string wire. Our principal form of actual communication was a little handheld wired radio called the PRC 10 or Prick 10, as it was universally known. The Prick 10 was not a telephone. It was a very simple radio. You pressed a button to talk and so long as you held the button down and talked, the person at the other end could listen but could not answer. To facilitate communication, we learned to end each part of a message with the expression “over” which was a shorthand way of saying “I am finished talking and I am taking my finger off the button so you can answer me now and I will listen.” A conversation consisted of a series of statements, each of which was punctuated with “over.” When you were done talking and were going to hang up rather than listen for a response you said “out,” which meant “this is the end of our conversation, do not reply.”

 

I was 23 at the time and all of this made a considerable impression on me, so it drives me absolutely bonkers when somebody in a movie or on television says “over and out.” These are flatly contradictory messages and no one who sad received communications training in the Army would ever combine them in this fashion.

 

But then the Vietnam War happened and because it almost destroyed the U.S. Army, the generals decided to move to an all volunteer army, which was much better suited to America’s new status as the leading imperial power in the world. There were lots of consequences to this transition to an all volunteer army, but the one that really eats away at me is that almost nobody anymore seems to understand that it is impossible, absurd, contradictory, not done, to say “over and out.”

 

I am sure there are more important things going on in the world at this moment but this really gets to me so I thought I would say something about it. Do me a favor. If you ever call me on a Prick 10, please do not say “over and out.”

TECH QUESTION

I have a question for the tech savvy readers out there. Some years ago I posted a series of 10 lectures on the subject of Ideological Critique. The 10^th lecture stands alone as an analysis of Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park along the lines of Edward Said’s analysis of the English novel. I think if I were to edit the lecture slightly and post it alone as a lecture on Jane Austen it might get more attention than it has had (only 1500 views).

 

Does anybody know how I could carry out that process of editing and re-posting?